Guided by the belief that a communist state was on the immediate horizon, communists asserted that women would occupy pivotal roles in the new society, and their representations thus prominently featured strong female warriors.

The fact that these female representations display distinctly masculine features, including builds that suggest masculine physical prowess and facial structures that depict strong bone lines and pronounced jaws, underscores the ambivalent nature of communist femininity. Communists’ views of women were steeped in paradox. On the one hand, the KPD consistently advocated women’s rights; on the other hand, the cadre as well as party leaders never fully committed themselves to gender equality. That Rosa Luxemburg, Ruth Fischer, and Clara Zetkin occupied the highest echelons of the KPD should not obscure the fact that women’s presence at all ranks in the party was marginal. The KPD was, as described by the contemporary statistician Dr. Hartwig, an “out-and-out men’s party.” Silvia Kontos advanced this argument in 1979, concluding “that the party fights like a man”; and there is ample evidence to corroborate Kontos’s assertion that the KPD was not fully committed to gender equality, either in the party or in society more generally. This helps to explain why communists depicted female warriors with masculine characteristics, for they believed, some times latently and sometimes overtly, that masculine prowess was essential on the frontlines of revolutionary struggle.

But what did it mean to “fight like a man”? While Kontos stressed the word “man” to highlight the KPD’s exclusion of women from the institutional realm of party politics, the word “fight” offers even greater insight into how the KPD constructed its public profile. As a revolutionary party, the KPD shaped itself into an organization that was committed to armed struggle. Its emphasis on aggressive politics and violent tactics contributed decisively to the fashioning of a political culture that prioritized not only men’s issues but also the male fighter. Despite significant efforts to recruit women and promote women’s issues, particularly during the late 1920s, communists, especially at the grassroots, cultivated a distinctly masculine culture that was dedicated to militancy.