The answer, on the whole, is yes. These two volumes are a monument of erudition and patient, thorough research – seventeen public archives in Western Germany alone have been consulted – though further research remains to be done. The major sources for the history of the KPD in the Weimar Republic are in Moscow, and therefore likely to be inaccessible for quite a while, and in East Berlin, and therefore also inaccessible to researchers without the backing of the Central Committee of the SED, among whom Dr Weber is not going to be numbered. He has had to rely essentially on public records, notably police files (when will students of the British left in the 1920s have as much access to relevant material in our Public Records as historians in other countries?), on a few private archives, a mass of interviews and memoranda from survivors of the period, printed sources and the literature. Probably he has not missed very much, but a monograph about six years of KPD history designed on this scale must inevitably suffer far more than a less detailed book from the inability to get at crucial documentation.
