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.10 Jacobs swife Dore, née Marcus, born 1894, the daughter of a distinguished,acculturated German-Jewish family, was also a pivotal figure in thenew grouping.11The group s adoption of the designation Bund reflected theappeal that the bündische life-reform movement had exerted withinGermany.12 Emerging from within the bourgeois youth movement,the bündisch groups were shaped partly by the notion of a covenantand partly by the model of the knightly order.The members agreedto subject themselves to the discipline of the group and follow theirnatural leader, freed from the humdrum rules of bourgeois society.For their part, Jacobs and his followers aimed to create a committedbut flexible community.Substituting true ethics for the constraints ofbourgeois propriety, the socialist community would enable the indi-vidual to develop his personality fully, protected by the group fromthe distracting calls of base drives and egoistic wishes.This concep-tion was certainly at the stricter end of the scale as far as the Bundistmodels around in the Weimar Republic were concerned and, indeed, The Pleasures of Opposition 261for a while the group went further and called itself an Orden , ororder.13Jacobs s Bund should be seen not just in the context of the youth move-ment that had influenced its style but also of the variety of other similarleft-socialist circles and political splinter-groups that emerged aroundthe same time, a number of which, like the Bund, explicitly sought tointegrate Kantian principles and socialist philosophy.The most famousis the Nelson-Bund or Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK,International Socialist Fighting League).14 Like the ISK, Jacobs wantedto create an informal yet fiercely loyal group, which would act as akind of ethical avant-garde for the mainstream left-wing political par-ties.Until 1930, when the German Communist Party (KPD) began toexclude Jacobs s followers, Bund members could be found in both themajor working-class parties.15 Providing a model meant not just fight-ing for social and political changes in society as a whole, but above allliving the Bund s principles on an everyday level.The individual shouldbe committed to the collective and be educated by it.As in the ISK,demands were placed on each member ranging from small virtues suchas punctuality to more significant sacrifices and commitments, includ-ing tithing a proportion of one s income.16 Without any formal decree,fulfilment of a number of minimum demands abstinence from alco-hol, leaving the church and other things was a requirement.17The Bund did not want to be a utopian circle removed from worldaffairs but rather a socialist community of life and struggle.at theheart of the urban and machine worlds and in close contact with theworking class and its struggle.18 It was concerned not just with the bat-tles and demands of high politics but with the attempt to engage seri-ously with socialism in the context of one s own life, to recognize thetruth and to realize it in one s own life.19 There was thus no distinctionbetween the personal and the political.As part of this the group tookan interest that was far from self-evident for left-wing groups in the1920s in questions of sexual equality and freedom in marriage. Manand woman [or Husband and wife] as comrades in the struggle was thetitle of a pamphlet published by the Bund in 1932, and in fact amongthe most challenging demands placed by the Bund on its members werethose that intruded on their marital or family lives.20The Bund s core was its so-called Inner Circle (IK) a group of nineto ten people, whose members swore an oath (in the Bund s words Verpflichtung or binding commitment) to place their life and energy without reservation (bedingungslos) at the service of the Bund and toput the fate of its mission (Schicksal der Sendung) before all else in their 262 Mark Rosemanlives.21 The Bund was thus in some respects a strongly hierarchicalorganization, but the hierarchy was supposed to be organic , and thusnatural and informal. As part of the ongoing struggle for clarity of out-look and understanding that characterizes Bund life, members developan organic, spiritual sense of their rank (organisches geistiges Ranggefühl),and each individual is guided unfailingly to a secure sense of his or herposition in the whole, eliminating any false democratic talk of equality(Gleichmacherei). 22 Or as the group s co-founder Dore Jacobs wrote in aprogrammatic article, A community that is truly focused on its purposewill never seek to overpower the superior leader. 23The number of those who swore the oath of commitment grew stead-ily and reached probably 30 40, though the IK s size and compositionremained relatively constant.The public ceremony of oath-taking waspreceded by a longer period of observation and participation, duringwhich the member involved was entrusted with increasing tasks andduties.Beyond the circle of those who had sworn the oath, the Bundhad attained by 1931 a regular membership of between 120 and 200people, with its strongest support in Essen und Wuppertal and otherlocal groups in Remscheid, Mülheim, Krefeld, Duisburg and Marl.24Most of the members were about 20 years younger than Jacobs andbelonged to the war-youth generation.Teachers (including gymnasticsteachers) and other academic professions amounted to about half ofthe group but the family background was in many cases proletarian.25Certainly there were also members from better-situated middle-classcircles, above all women, who admired the Bund s social conscienceand its ability to bridge class boundaries.There were also a number ofJews in the group, not least Artur s wife Dore.26The Bund thus elided conventional boundaries of public and private,organized and informal activity.It was a circle of friends rather thana formal organization but it was a very tight-knit group of people whospent much time together, in some cases living together, who discussedeverything and who swore a solemn oath or commitment to oneanother
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