This book is a significant achievement: it is the first sustained analysis of the different aspects of Communist photographic practice in Weimar Germany. There have been analyses of major publications such as Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung and studies of the worker photography movement and of important individuals such as Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield but these have not been integrated.¹ Yet what does such an integration yield?

Joschke’s point of departure – as is made clear in the book’s title – is the failure of the revolution in Germany. He identifies, quite reasonably, a first phase of revolutionary activity between the founding of the German Communist party in late 1918 and the abortive »German October« of 1923, and then a period between 1924 and 1929 when there were a regrouping of German Communists and a rethinking of tactics (32). Finally, there was a period of increased activity as Communists mobilised against the National Socialists. This view is unremarkable (and Joschke does not pretend otherwise), but it does have particular consequences for the study of photography. By starting with the ebbing of the revolutionary wave, Joschke puts German experience at a distance from Soviet experience and his inclination is to maintain this distance, even when there are Soviet precedents for German practice, as was the case for the worker photography movement. Joschke does not make all German activity dependent on Comintern policy and this certainly makes sense as a way of approaching the work of Münzenberg, understandably a key figure in Joschke’s account: Münzenberg was an energetic activist who tried hard to maintain autonomy for his media empire and would finally be excluded from the party in 1937.

Joschke is a cautious scholar and prefers to survey a terrain with care before advancing. Each of the three main sections of the book – dealing with »Agitprop«, Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung and worker photography – has an expository chapter followed by a detailed account of how policies and strategies were pursued. Joschke takes particular care to establish the networks supporting the different aspects of photographic practice (here making effective use of a great range of published and archival sources).

The focus is close to the ground, so to speak. This has definite advantages. For example, it allows for a nuanced sense of the social composition of the worker photography movement. Joschke shows that, despite the costs of cameras, plates, film and developing, German Communist photographers were from the proletariat and not from the »worker’s aristocracy«. Moreover, as many members of the rival Social Democratic Arbeiter Lichtbild-Bund came from the ranks of the Naturfreunde, they had quite different ambitions from the militant Communist photographers (221–227, 297). However, focussing on the agents on the ground does have drawbacks. A magazine such as Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung may be analysed through its address to its readers, its attempts to educate the eye of the worker, yet how is this education to be understood? To answer that it is an education in class consciousness rather begs the question. Unveiling the exploitation of capitalists, an important ambition of the magazine, does not lead straightforwardly to a consciousness of the need for revolutionary struggle. In 1920 Lukács asserted »that class consciousness is identical with neither the psychological consciousness of individual members of the proletariat, nor with the (mass-psychological) consciousness of the proletariat as a whole; but it is, on the contrary, the sense, become conscious, of the historical role of the class«.² And Lenin had argued in What is to Be Done? that this class awareness can be brought to the worker »only from without«.³ So whilst Joschke has very good reasons for steering his account away from the role of the party hierarchy and the Comintern, this does leave unresolved important questions about the formation of class consciousness.

I would have liked to see these questions probed more deeply but I must be clear that they are not the principal focus of the book. Instead, Joschke has pursued an enquiry into the networks of the illustrated revolutionary press. The new Communist party had to find an alternative to the dominant bourgeois media, and Joschke argues that in Germany this involved the participation of militants and readers (16). And he is quite clear that the new »horizontal« strategies developed to this end by Münzenberg and his collaborators were at odds with the hierarchical model of the party (86). Joschke’s aim is to demonstrate how this participation was generated: integrating the study of worker photography with a study of the revolutionary press enables him to succeed admirably.