Heinrich Laufenberg

In 1907, on Franz Mehring's recommendation, Laufenberg was commissioned by the Hamburg SPD executive to research the history of the city's labour movement, publishing the first volume of his History of the Labour Movement in Hamburg, Altona and Environs in 1911. He became head of the Hamburg party school in 1912 but had to give up his party offices that year because of his radical views. When war came in 1914 he joined the left radicals who opposed the war credits, and with Fritz Wolffheim published Imperialism and Democracy (1914) and Democracy and Organisation (1915), moving towards council-communist and syndicalist ideas. From 1916 he was close to Johann Knief, who edited Arbeiterpolitik in Bremen.

In the November Revolution of 1918 he became chairman of the Hamburg Workers' and Soldiers' Council for the left radicals. On 12 November the council, against the votes of the SPD representatives, resolved to take political power and dissolve the city parliament and senate, and the bourgeois press dubbed him the "red dictator". But when the banks threatened to cut off credit he agreed to restore the two bodies, and amid food shortages, strikes and demonstrations by SPD-minded workers he resigned on 20 January 1919. At the first national congress of councils in December he led the small group of "United Revolutionaries".

In the KPD he led the left opposition with Wolffheim and Otto Rühle, calling for independent economic fighting organisations instead of the existing unions and for a boycott of elections, and was expelled at the Heidelberg congress in October 1919. Meanwhile he and Wolffheim advocated "National Bolshevism": a dictatorship of the proletariat that would harness German nationalism and, allied with Soviet Russia, resume the war against the Allies. Lenin dismissed it as absurd in "Left-Wing" Communism. He co-founded the KAPD in April 1920 but was expelled for these ideas in August; seriously ill, he withdrew from politics in 1922 and died impoverished in 1932.