THE LAST REVOLUTIONARIES: German Communists and Their Century. By Catherine Epstein. Harvard Univ. Press. 322 pp. $29.95

The truly remarkable revelation at the heart of The Last Revolutionaries is how little the German Communists changed over the course of the 20th century. While the world around them was transformed—by war, politics, culture, the growth of a complex interdependence—the pre-1933 radicals who became the dictators and propagandists of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) hewed to a static worldview. This rigidity, the Communists maintained, was the only way East Germany could steel itself against the capitalist, imperialist West. In the end, though, their refusal to change hastened the unraveling of the corrupt and backward GDR regime.

A history professor at Amherst College, Catherine Epstein puts this changelessness into sharp relief by tracing the rises and falls of some of the most prominent German Communists, from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich to the Cold War to the post-Cold War era. These include the only two men to rule the GDR during its four-decade existence (1949–89), Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, as well as lesser-known figures such as Karl Schirdewan, Gerhart Eisler, Franz Dahlem, and Emmy Koenen. Their stories—which feature Nazi concentration camps, forced exile, the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Gulag, and the ruthless autocritiques that became a hallmark of communist life—provide deep insights into socialist totalitarianism.

Particularly helpful is Epstein’s discussion of the complicated interplay of personal and political forces. How, for example, could Marxists reconcile their ideology with the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact of 1939? Or the 1953 workers’ strikes? Or a party that from the beginning impugned, imprisoned, and in some cases murdered many of its most committed backers, all in the name of the proletariat?

Unfortunately, Epstein doesn’t really plumb the underlying psychology here. She piques our interest by pointing to the unavoidable conflict of collective versus individual interests, but she never moves beyond, or below, the obvious. Veteran Communists, she writes, had invested their whole lives in the workers’ struggle; they feared what might happen if they were suspected of "arrogance," "individuality," or other bourgeois tendencies; and they genuinely believed that Marxism-Leninism, despite its dictatorships and food shortages, was superior to free-market democracy. "Communism was their raison d’être; to break with their faith would have dissolved the master narrative of their lives into countless meaningless episodes."

That’s fine, but it reads a bit thin. The power of the totalitarian idea, as Milan Kundera and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others, have articulated, is the power to dissolve the sense of self and to corrode the fabric of society until there are no relations, no freely feeling and freely thinking human beings—indeed, no community—but only atoms tethered to the state. This is a rich and complicated topic, layered with thought, myth, and emotion, and it deserves deeper probing.

The Last Revolutionaries is well written, intelligent, and, unlike much of what is called history nowadays, devoid of postmodernist lingo and other academic fashion statements. But by the end, one is still left to wonder what exactly compelled these people to stay faithful to a regime and a politics that had wrought so much devastation.

—Peter Savodnik