Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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policy. The opponents of war were expelled and in April 1917, the Independent German Socialist party (USPD) was formed. Among their membership was Karl Kautski, Hugo Haase (chairman of the SPD since Bebel’s death in 1913), and even revisionists like Eduard Bernstein. In addition, the left wing, which had formed itself into the Spartacus League at the beginning of 1916, joined the USPD.
Although the Swiss Social Democratic Party (SPS) belonged to the First and Second Internationals, the socialist movement in Switzerland underwent a dramatic radicalization at the outbreak of World War I. It was Lenin who exercised the decisive impact on the workers’ movement in Switzerland. On September 5, 1914, Lenin arrived with Nadeshda Krupskaja and her mother in Bern and led a discussion with Robert Grimm on the socialist situation in Switzerland. Lenin was on a campaign to win the young workers for the socialist cause as he did later in Zurich. In February 1916 Lenin and Nadeshda Krupskaja moved from Bern to Zurich and remained there until they returned to Russia in April 1917. Zurich was a great place for Lenin to concentrate on scientific socialist writings in the library there; and in addition, people of a leftist orientation gathered there from all other countries. In Zurich Lenin worked on his book Der Imperialismus als höchstes Stadium des Kapitalismus.199
When the war split the SPS into various fractions, three different groups emerged: the social chauvinists, the left wing of socialists, and the centrists. The social chauvinist group was represented by Gruetliverein, and its direction was under the leadership of people such as Herman Greulich, Paul Pflüger, Gustav Müller, and Johann Sigg. This right wing supported the unconditional defense of the fatherland and Burgfrieden, whereas the left wing struggled against the war and their opponents in Switzerland. Centrists took an opportunistic attitude between the two opposing trends. The left-wing group was represented under the leadership of Münzenberg, Fritz Platten, and people of Revoluzzer. Robert Grimm was one of the most important leaders among leading centrists, who were a majority within the socialist workers’ movement in Switzerland.
Although the SPS officially sent its delegates to the Zimmerwald Conference (September 5 to 8, 1915), some of its representatives, such as Grimm, Platten, and Naine, also freely participated in the conference. The manifesto of Zimmerwald leftists and their resolution Weltkrieg und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie were underwritten by Platten from the Swiss side. Zimmerwald leftists argued that the imperialist war was conditioned by the economic system of capitalism, and the war must be regarded as a necessary result of this economic system. Therefore, Marxism should be further applied and developed toward the stage of late capitalism. Furthermore, the imperialist war must be transformed into a revolutionary civil war through an internationally led class struggle against the bourgeois of all countries. Lenin and Zimmerwald leftists blamed the collapse of the International on treachery and opportunism on the part of the social-democratic leaders. Through this position, Bolshevists and Zimmerwald leftists distanced themselves sharply from all pacifist attempts. In fact, the 1915 Zimmerwald conference paved the way for the foundation of the Third International.
However, a couple months before the Zimerwald conference, a meeting of the Zimmerwald group was held in Bern and Olten. In a meeting of the small Bureau of Zimmerwald union (in winter of 1916) there occurred a sharp contrast between the Grimm-led centrist group and the Bolshevist group. In 1915/16 Zimmerwald leftists in Switzerland penetrated the workers’ movement. In addition, Münzenburg, a director of the Swiss Socialist Youth organization, mentioned that Zimmerwald leftists in the SPS had taken action in close connection with Lenin and his Bolshevik group, with whom they had kept close contact since the fall of 1915.200
According to Münzenberg, the Swiss Socialist Youth followed Lenin’s way to revolution. “After we . . . had known Lenin personally, we gained the firm conviction that he was the right leader, who could point us to the right way to a good revolutionary activity.”201 That the revolution needed an avant-garde fighter was Lenin’s political motto. On the question of revolutionary use of violence, Lenin attacked religious socialists by calling them emotionally tearful social clerics who stood in the way of the working class’s use of violence. Ragaz in turn criticized Leninism as an ideology that led to the necessity of violence. In 1917 the Socialist Youth International published Lenin’s pamphlet Militärprogramm der proletarischen Revolution and Lenin’s Abschiedsbrief an die Schweizer Arbeiter. In opposition to Christian socialists and the centrists of Robert Grimm, who were afraid of using weapons, Lenin said, “the capitalistic society was and is always a shock without end.”202 In spring 1917, the Youth organization deviated from religious socialism by following the socialist theory of Lenin. Zimmerwald leftists gained the first success in the party assembly of November 20 and 21, 1915, in Aarau in the SPS. The resolution of the party assembly was that “the war can be brought to an end only through the revolutionary action of the working class.”203 This above-mentioned milieu was the situation of the Swiss Socialist Party when Barth joined there.
Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen: World War I and Socialism
In his curriculum vitae, which Barth formulated in the evangelical faculty at the University of Münster (1927) we read: “First the outbreak of the world war brought a turn.” This refers to Barth’s turn to theological work in a determined perspective and expectation, that is, from the standpoint of the kingdom of God toward which the two Blumhardts’ message of Christian hope was principally oriented.204 Barth’s break with his theological teachers and neo-Protestantism began with the outbreak of World War I. In August 1914, counter to Barth’s expectations from Social Democracy in his Die Hilfe 1913, socialist representatives in the Reichstag voted to support the war policy and grant war credit finances to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. German troops invaded Belgium. Then, to Barth’s amazement, ninety-three German intellectuals published a petition in support of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s war policies and government. As Barth remembered,
One day in early August 1914 stands out in my personal memory as a black day. Ninety-three German intellectuals impressed public opinion by their proclamation in support of the war policy of Wilhelm II and his counselors. Among these intellectuals I discovered to my horror almost all of my theological teachers whom I had greatly venerated. In despair over what this indicated about the signs of the time I suddenly realized that I could not any longer follow either their ethics and dogmatics or their understanding of the Bible and of history. For me at least, 19th century theology no longer held any future.205
Barth experienced the twilight of the gods as he witnessed Harnack, Herrmann, Rade, Eucken, and the like positioning themselves with respect to the new situation. All his German teachers, with the exception of Rade, were compromised in the face of ideological war. “It was like the twilight of the gods when I saw the reaction of Harnack, Herrmann, Rade, Eucken and company to the new situation, and discovered how religion and scholarship could be changed completely, into intellectual 42cm cannons.” “The ethical failure of the liberal theologians in Germany has to do with a failure of their exegetical and dogmatic presupposition.” For Barth, “a whole world of exegesis, ethics, dogmatics and preaching,” which he regarded “to be essentially trustworthy, was shaken to the foundations, and with it, all the other writings of the German theologians.”206
Thurneysen was pastor in the Aargau in the congregation of Leutwill from 1913 until 1920. He reported that Barth was preoccupied with the Holy Scripture, erecting the tablets of the Bible before him and reading the books of expositors from Calvin though the Biblicists to the modern critical interpretation of the Bible. On the basis of the Bible, Barth’s theological thinking was deeply related to the life of humankind, namely, the wholeness of human existence from the beginning. In Thurneysen’s characterization, “Karl Barth as a proclaimer of the biblical Word had also a very vigorous and concrete word to speak