Konrad Haenisch

Konrad Haenisch.

Konrad Haenisch (13 March 1876 - 28 April 1925) was a German Social Democratic Party politician and part of "the radical Marxist Left" of German politics.^[1] Friend and follower (Parvulus in his own words) of Alexander Parvus.

Haenisch was born in Greifswald, Province of Pomerania. He initially opposed World War I in 1914, but subsequently supported it. In a speech given to the 1916 SDP conference, he remembered the 'August enthusiasm':

The conflict of two souls in one breast was probably easy for none of us. [It lasted] until suddenly—I shall never forget the day and hour—the terrible tension was resolved; until one dared to be what one was; until—despite all principles and wooden theories—one could, for the first time in almost a quarter century, join with a full heart, a clean conscience and without a sense of treason in the sweeping, stormy song: "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles".^[2]

Haenisch died, aged 49, in Wiesbaden.

Notes

1. ↑ Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism. Radical and Socialist Critics 1866-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 138.
2. ↑ Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905-1917. The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge University Press, 1955), p. 290.