Alexander Schifrin

Alexander Michailowitsch Schifrin (born August 11, 1901 in Charkow , Russia ; † January 8, 1951 in New York City ) (pseudonym Herbert Röhn, Max Werner) was a German-Russian journalist, publicist and political theorist.

Life and activity

Shifrin was born in Kharkov, Russia. After attending school, he studied at Kharkov University , which he graduated with a doctorate in social sciences. He then taught economics. As a supporter of the Menshevik direction of Russian social democracy, he became a member of the main committee of the SDARP in Ukraine and was involved in the illegal underground work of the Ukrainian Mensheviks . In 1922 Shifrin was arrested and sentenced to exile to Siberia. Like almost all members of the Russian Menshevik party executive committee, he was forced to leave the country.

After Schifrin was expelled to Palestine , he went from there to Germany. There he quickly made contact with the German Social Democrats. Schifrin, who was regarded by many contemporary observers as the intellectual prodigy of the Mensheviks in exile, was appointed permanent editor (in some cases even co-editor) of the Mannheimer Volksstimme in 1928 when he was less than 30 years old . In addition, during the Weimar Republic , Schifrin was a contributor to the journal Die Gesellschaft , published by Rudolf Hilferding , the theoretical organ of the SPD, so that in the late 1920s he became a leading theoretician of the social democratic left in the Weimar Republic.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Schifrin fled Germany. He first settled in Paris as an emigrant. There Schifrin worked alongside Kurt Glaser on the board of the Paris group of Revolutionary Socialists in Germany. During this time Schifrin supported the idea of ​​forming a social democratic-communist popular front and actively campaigned for its implementation. He took part in the conferences of the Provisional Committee for the Preparation of a German Popular Front in 1935 and 1936 and campaigned in the German exile press for the German workers' parties to come together.

After these efforts had failed, Schifrin supported the concentration efforts of the socialist emigrants. Since 1939 he belonged to the Union Franco-Allemande founded by Willi Münzenberg .

In 1940 Schifrin went to the United States. There he lived in New York, where he wrote articles for the magazine NEW Republic as a military-political publicist under the pseudonym Max Werner . He also published several books. During the war he appeared in German-language shortwave broadcasts that the Columbia Broadcasting Station radioed to Europe. In 1951 he died of heart failure.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police authorities classified Schifrin as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin (which erroneously suspected him to be in Great Britain) put Schifrin on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who were to be found in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles should be located and arrested by the Wehrmacht from the occupation troops following special commandos of the SS with special priority.

Fonts

Essays :

• "The Colonial Problems of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Revolution", in: Der Kampf 21 (1928, Hegt 8/9, pp. 345–359)
• “Party apparatus and party democracy”, in: Die Gesellschaft, Vol. 1 (1930), pp. 505-528.
• “Party problems after the elections”, in: Die Gesellschaft, 7/1930, pp. 395–412 (reprint in: Grebing: Confrontation with National Socialism , pp. 294–309)
• "Thoughts of the swastika", in: Die Gesellschaft , born 1931, vol. 1, pp. 97–116,
• “Changes in the defense struggle”, in: Die Gesellschaft , born 1931, vol. 1, pp. 395–417.
• "Crisis Conclusion and Combat Perspectives", in: Die Gesellschaft 9th vol. (1932) Vol. 2, Issue 12, pp. 471ff.

Monographs :

• The deployment of World War II , Strasbourg 1938. (under the pseudonym Max Werner)
  • English translation: The Military Strength of the Powers , 1939.
• Socialism, War and Europe , Strasbourg 1938.
• Battle for the World. The Strategy and Diplomacy of the Second World War , London 1941. (under the pseudonym Max Werner)
• The great offensive. The Strategy of Coalition Warfare , New York 1942.

literature

• André Liebich : From the Othere Shore , 1997, p. 340.
• Uli Schöler : “Totalitarian Theoretical Approaches in Alexander Schifrin. A border crosser between Russian and German social democracy ”, in: Mike Schmeitzner (Ed.): Criticism of totalitarianism from the left. German Discourses in the 20th Century , 2007, pp. 69–82
• Bruno Jahn: The German-language press. A biographical-bibliographical handbook , Vol. 1, Munich 2005, p. 930