Colorized photo of Ernst Thälmann in 1932.
He was the leader of the KPD, the German communist party, after the social democrats had murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg during the course of their counter-revolution to the November Revolution. Especially after the murder of Luxemburg the German communist movement was headless, and Thälmann tried his best, but he was not a great theoretician and thus not up to the task of navigating the struggles against both the rabidly anti-communist social democrats and the Nazis. He was eventually murdered by the Nazis after beign kept in a concentration camp for years. Unlike Gramsci he was not able to transform this torture into a cauldron for theoretical investigation. Still, he was the last somewhat capable leader the German communist movement produced.
