Mount Cambitas
There was much going on in the world in 1927.
With the death of Vladimir I. Lenin (1870-1924) there began a struggle for political power in the Soviet Union that lasted four years. During these four years the Soviet Union took on an increasingly nationalistic character championed by Joseph W. Stalin (1878-1953) who carefully weeded out his political opposition within the ruling communist party. In 1927 Leo D. Trotzki (1879-1940), born Leo D. Bronstein, fell victim to Stalin’s political intrigue, was evicted from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (KPdSU), and fled to Turkey. Unlike Stalin, Trotzki promoted communism on a world-wide scale; he was a devout Marxist who would be murdered while living in, by then, voluntary exile in Mexico in 1940.
It was also in 1927 that the Kuomintang Party under Chiang Kai-Shek (1887-1975) and the Chinese Communist Party split, and Chiang Kai-Shek formed a new Chinese capitol in Nanjing, not all that far from the coastal city of ShangHai. It was during this same year that Mao Tse-Tung (1893-1976) engaged in his first peasant revolt as a local head of the Chinese Communist Party.
In Germany, the formerly imprisoned Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and founder of the newly reconstituted NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), was given permission to speak in public — well, at least, in Bayern. Other German States remained fearful of Hitler’s negative influence on the still fledgling Weimar Republic. Upon his release from prison in 1924 Hitler had agreed to cease his effort to dismantle the Weimar Republic, but not everyone was convinced.
It was also in 1927 that Charles Lindberg (1902-1974) would successfully complete his solo-flight across the North Atlantic in his single-engine aircraft named the Spirit of St. Louis, and that the two financial capitals of New York City and Frankfurt, Germany would come together in their first, live, trans-Atlantic, radio-transmitted conversation.
In 1927 Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Kurt Weill (1900-1950) began work on their musical play entitled Mahagonny, Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) wrote his novel, Steppenwolf, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) wrote his essay, Amerika, and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) completed his philosophical treatise entitled Sein und Zeit. The Weimar Republic was, politically speaking, socialist in character.
During this same year Great Britain broke its diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, while Gustav Stresemann chaired the spring meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Unfortunately, Stresemann failed to convince his British colleague, Joseph Austen Chamberlain (1863-1937), half-brother of Arthur Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940) and former Chancellor of the British Exchequer (1919-1921), to agree to a complete Allied withdrawal from Germany. The question of the Polish-German border remained undecided.
In liberty, or not at all,
Roddy A. Stegemann, First Hill, Seattle 98104
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