Ernst Niekisch

Ernst Niekisch (23 May 1889 – 23 May 1967) was a German politician. Initially associated with mainstream left-wing politics he later became a prominent exponent of National Bolshevism.

Born in Trebnitz (Silesia), and brought up in Nördlingen, he became a school teacher by profession. He joined the SPD in 1917 and was instrumental in the setting up of a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Indeed, for a time at the start of the year, following the resignation of Kurt Eisner and immediately before the establishment of the Soviet Republic Niekisch wielded effective power as chairman of the central executive of Bavarian councils, an interim governing body. He left the SPD soon after and joined the USPD for a time, before returning. He served a brief spell in prison in 1925 for his part in the abortive Bavarian revolution.

During the 1920s he stressed the importance of nationalism and attempted to turn the SPD in that direction. He was vehemently opposed to the Dawes Plan, the Locarno Treaties and the general pacifism of the SPD, so much so that he was expelled from the party in 1926.

Upon his expulsion Niekisch joined and took control of the Old Socialist Party of Saxony which he converted to his own nationalist form of socialism, launching his own journal Widerstand (Resistance). Niekisch and his followers adopted the name of "National Bolsheviks" and looked to the Soviet Union as a continuation of both Russian nationalism and the old state of Prussia. The movement took the slogan of "Sparta-Potsdam-Moscow". He was a member of ARPLAN - the Association for the Study of Russian Planned Economy - along with Ernst Jünger, Georg Lukács, Karl Wittfogel and Friedrich Hielscher, under whose auspices he visited the Soviet Union in 1932. He reacted favourably to Jünger's publication Der Arbeiter which he saw as a blueprint for a National Bolshevik Germany. He also believed in the necessity of a German-Soviet alliance against the "decadent West" and the Treaty of Versailles. The attempt to combine ultra-nationalism and communism, two extreme ends of the political spectrum, made Niekisch's National Bolsheviks a force with little support.

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