a weekly journal of arts and politics, subtitled Wochenschrift fur Politik, Literatur, Kunst and edited by Franz Pfemfert. Launched in 1911 as an underground journal, Aktion endured until Pfemfert emigrated in 1932 to Mexico. During World War I the censor forced it to focus exclusively on culture; it reverted to politics in 1918. Aktion was vital—as was Herwarth Walden's* Sturm—in launching Expressionism.* After the November Revolution* it aimed to "organize the intelligentsia." Its contributors included Hugo Ball,* Gottfried Benn,* Carl Einstein, Georg Heym, Else Lasker-Schuler,* Carl Sternheim,* Franz Werfel, and Carl Zuckmayer.* Suffering financial problems, it appeared irregularly after 1927.
In the decade before 1910, when he began editing Der Demokrat, Pfemfert had associated with Berlin's* anarchists; he worked later with the syndicalist Communist Workers' Party (Kommunistische Arbeiter Partei Deutschlands or KAPD). He was a blunt and energetic radical, more plebeian than those who wrote for him. His quarrel with Der Demokrat's publisher led him to assume control of the journal in February 1911; he renamed it Die Aktion. Although he was troubled by the SPD's failure to promote its revolutionary program, his socialism was always more cultural than political. Rebuking the KPD as antirevolutionary and the Third International as revisionist, he slowly isolated him-self in the 1920s.
REFERENCES:Thomas Friedrich, Berlin between the Wars; Hurlimann, Berlin; Wurgaft, Activists.
A Historical dictionary of Germany's Weimar Republic, 1918-1933. C. Paul Vincent.