Alfred Kurella

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Alfred Kurella (1967)

Alfred Kurella (born May 2, 1895 in Brieg , Province of Silesia , † June 12, 1975 in Berlin ) was a German writer , translator and cultural functionary of the SED in the GDR .

Live and act

Alfred Kurella, son of the doctor and psychiatrist Hans Kurella (1858–1916), studied painting and graphics at the Munich School of Applied Arts after attending grammar school in Breslau , Ahrweiler and Bonn . He became a volunteer in World War I in 1914 . After being released from military service through simulation , he lived from 1916 as a tutor and employee of left-wing bourgeois newspapers in Leipzig and Dresden .

From 1910 to 1918 Kurella was a member of the youth movement ; in October 1913 he was a participant in the First Freideutschen Youth Day on the Hoher Meissner and later editor of the magazine Freideutsche Jugend . Together with Walter Benjamin , Hans Blüher , Ernst Joëll , Fritz Klatt , the brothers Hans and Walter Koch, Hans Kollwitz , Erich Krems and Alexander Rustow , he was also a member of the Westend Circle , which brought together the left wing of the bourgeois youth movement. Klatt was probably the intellectual and journalistic engine of this union. In 1917 and 1918 Kurella tried to unite the bourgeois youth movement that had meanwhile been split up and decimated by the war, a project that failed.

In 1918 Kurella was the founder of the local group of the Free Socialist Youth in Munich and joined the KPD . On a trip as a courier of the KPD he met in 1919 Moscow with Lenin together. As a representative of the Russian Communist Youth Association, he was co-founder of the Communist Youth International (KJI) and from 1921 first secretary of the Berlin and Moscow Executive Committees of the KJI. At the same time he was a member of the office of the Central Committee of the Komsomol from 1920 and of the WKP (B) from 1924 to 1929 . During these years he published under the pseudonyms Viktor Röbig (1919) and Bernhard Ziegler and A. Bernard (1920–1929).

From 1924 to 1926 he directed a youth school of the Communist International (Comintern) and a school of the French Communist Party in Bobigny . From 1926 to 1928 Kurella was deputy head of the Agitprop department of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, in 1928 and 1929 head of the fine arts department in the People's Commissariat for Popular Education of the RSFSR and editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda .

Due to allegations of “ultra-left, formalistic errors”, Kurella returned to Germany, where he worked as a freelance writer and was active for the KPD. In 1931 he taught at the Marxist Workers' School (MASCH) and went on a study trip to Italy . From 1932 to 1934 he was secretary of the international committee for the fight against war and fascism and editor-in-chief of its organ Le Front Mondiale . In this role he worked closely with Henri Barbusse . Kurella was editor-in-chief of Monde magazine until autumn 1933 . "He took care of that as, salon socialist 'criticized [...] magazine about from autumn 1932 Stalinized , or on the line of the Comintern and the Soviet Writers' Union was brought. The libertarian and anti-Stalinist collaborators and authors also fell victim to this process ”.

From March 1934 to February 1935 Kurella worked as Georgi Dimitrov's personal secretary in Moscow and until 1937 in the scientific and bibliographic department of the Moscow Central Library for Foreign Literature. There he had to ensure the removal of foreign language writings that were considered Trotskyist or otherwise "deviant". Kurella wrote a hagiographic biography of Stalin in 1935 , which was published under the name of Barbusse - in 1937 it was withdrawn because it contained quotes from alleged enemies of the state.

In 1936 he wrote the novel Die Gronauer Akten against the background of the impending danger of being branded as a “Doppelzüngler” and a victim of the Great Terror . This novel, in the opinion of Martin Schaad an " Aesopian masterpiece", which was supposed to serve the political rehabilitation of Kurella, could not be published at that time for political reasons. This only happened in 1954.

In 1937 Kurella became a Soviet citizen. In the same year, his younger brother, the journalist Heinrich Kurella (1905–1937), was arrested in Moscow , sentenced to death and shot. " Hedda Zinner remembered in 1989 that there was talk in Moscow that Alfred had denounced his brother Heinrich." According to Martin Schaad, however, there is no evidence in the sources for this claim.

During the Second World War , Kurella was senior editor in the political headquarters of the Red Army from 1941 to 1945 . He worked as an editor of various (front) newspapers and in December 1942 / January 1943 also completed a propaganda assignment in the Velikiye Luki pocket . In 1943 he worked on the draft of the manifesto of the National Committee Free Germany and was the chief editor for the information section of its newspaper Free Germany .

In 1946 Kurella moved to the Abkhazian village of Pskhu in the Caucasus , where he lived primarily as a painter and sculptor, but also as a writer, translator and editor (including works by Nikolai Chernyshevsky , Nikolai Dobroljubow , Alexander Herzen and Taras Shevchenko ). Since 1948 he tried to get permission to return to Germany. From 1949 he lived in Moscow again. Not without controversy in the SED , Kurella was requested by Walter Ulbricht in 1949, while Johannes R. Becher and Wilhelm Pieck tried to postpone Kurella's return. As a high-ranking secret service and nomenclature cadre of the Comintern, Kurella had to wait until his return to Germany in 1954, the usual five-year cold phase for Soviet keepers of secrets.

On February 9, 1954, Kurella moved to the GDR, joined the SED and was the first director of the Institute for Literature in Leipzig from 1955 to 1957 . He took on leading positions in the Academy of the Arts , the Writers' Association of the GDR and the Kulturbund . From 1957 to 1963 he was head of the cultural commission of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED, from 1958 also a candidate of the Politburo (until 1963) and a member of the People's Chamber . In these functions Kurella, who remained a lover of the works of Stefan George throughout his life, played a key role in the implementation of Socialist Realism and numerous cultural-political interventions by the SED. He was considered a Stalinist and as such destroyed careers and artistic creation that he considered to be harmful to the party. From 1963 he was a member of the Ideological Commission of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED . In 1968 he received his doctorate at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena Dr. phil. with the work “The own and the foreign” .

Kurella's grave in Berlin

From 1938 Kurella was with the doctor Elfriede Cohn-Vossen, geb. Ranft († 1957), married; she was the widow of Stefan Cohn-Vossen . He became the stepfather of Richard Cohn-Vossen . His son Gregor Kurella from his first marriage was one of the few Germans who fought in the Red Army from 1942 to 1945. Like his father, he worked as a translator for anti-fascist leaflets and agitation pamphlets among Wehrmacht soldiers. In 1958, Alfred Kurella, who was again widowed, married Sonja (1924–2013), a daughter of Georg Schwarz .

Awards

Kurella was awarded the Karl Marx Order in 1960 , the National Prize in 1969 and the Culture Prize of the FDGB and the FDJ in 1970 as well as the honor bar for the Patriotic Order of Merit. His urn was buried in the memorial of the socialists in the central cemetery Friedrichsfelde in Berlin-Lichtenberg .

Works and writings

  • Wandervogel Lautenbuch , Magdeburg 1913.
  • Foundation and development of the Communist Youth International , Berlin 1929.
  • Mussolini without a mask , reports, 1931.
  • Where is Madrid located? , Kiev 1939.
  • I live in Moscow , 1947.
  • The Gronauer Akten , Roman, 1954.
  • Man as creator of himself , essays, Berlin 1958.
  • Occasionally. Scattered Essays , 1961.
  • Little stone in a big game , novel, 1961.
  • Dimitroff versus Göring , Berlin 1964.
  • On the way to Lenin , Berlin 1967; Filmed under the title of the same name in 1970.
  • The own and the foreign. New contributions to socialist humanism , Aufbau, Berlin 1968 (307 pages); 2nd, expanded edition 1970 (343 pages); Dietz, Berlin 1981 (521 pages).
  • The Whole Man , Talking, 1969.
  • Alfred Kurella, Elfriede Cohn-Vossen: The dream of Ps'chu. A marriage correspondence in World War II , ed. from the Academy of Arts of the GDR , Aufbau-Verlag Berlin, 1984

literature

Web links

Commons : Alfred Kurella  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ulrike Koch: "I found out about it from Fritz Klatt" - Käthe Kollwitz and Fritz Klatt . In: Käthe Kollwitz and her friends: Catalog for the special exhibition on the occasion of the 150th birthday of Käthe Kollwitz . Published by the Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Berlin, Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-8673-2282-9 , p. 65.
  2. ^ Anna M. Lazzarino Del Grosso: Poverty and wealth in the thinking of Gerhoh von Reichersberg . CH Beck, Munich 1973. p. 83.
  3. ^ Martin Schaad: The fabulous confessions of comrade Alfred Kurella , pp. 138-142.
  4. ↑ Pseudonyms from the contents of the documents in the Federal Archives. sa: Martin Schaad: The fabulous confessions of Comrade Alfred Kurella, p. 8 f, p. 76, p. 170.
  5. ^ Hermann Weber , Jakov Drabkin, Bernhard H. Bayerlein (ed.): II: Germany, Russia, Comintern - documents (1918–1943). After the archive revolution: Newly developed sources on the history of the KPD and German-Russian relations (Archives of Communism - Paths of the XXth Century, Volume 6), De Gruyter, Berlin 1914, p. 1006 f, note 136, ISBN 978-3 -11-033979-6 ( access from Verlag De Gruyter ).
  6. ↑ Martin Schaad: The fabulous confessions of Comrade Alfred Kurella , p. 72. See also the self- statement : Alfred Kurella about the "literary activity" after his removal from the Comintern work , [Moscow], September 18, 1936, as document no. 392 Printed in: Hermann Weber , Jakov Drabkin, Bernhard H. Bayerlein (Eds.): II: Germany, Russia, Comintern - Documents (1918–1943). After the archive revolution: Newly developed sources on the history of the KPD and German-Russian relations (Archives of Communism - Paths of the XXth Century, Volume 6), De Gruyter, Berlin 1914, pp. 1273–1276, ISBN 978-3-11- 033979-6 ( access from Verlag De Gruyter ).
  7. ↑ Jan C. Behrends: The invented friendship. Propaganda for the Soviet Union in Poland and in the GDR , Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2006, p. 51 f , ISBN 3-412-23005-7 ; Annette Kabanov: Ol'ga Michajlovna Frejdenberg (1890–1955). A Soviet scientist between canon and freedom , Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2002 ISBN 3-447-04607-4 , p. 81 .
  8. ↑ On the novel Die Gronauer Akten in detail Martin Schaad: The fabulous confessions of comrade Alfred Kurella . It is rated as an “Aesopian masterpiece” there, for example on p. 158.
  9. ^ Kurella, Alfred ; in: Biographical databases of the Federal Foundation for the processing of the SED dictatorship.
  10. ^ Lecture by Martin Schaad about Kurella in the Einstein Forum (February 2013), YouTube video, 1: 08: 15–1: 09: 10.
  11. ^ Martin Schaad: The fabulous confessions of comrade Alfred Kurella , pp. 119–125.
  12. ^ "From free spirit to Stalinist" , in Potsdamer Latest News , February 13, 2013.
  13. ^ Entry in the biographical database of the Federal Foundation for Work-Up
personal data
SURNAME Kurella, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Binder, Heinrich (pseudonym); Röbig, Victor (pseudonym); Ziegler, Bernhard (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer, translator, cultural functionary and politician (SED), MdV
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Brieg Upper Silesia
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 1975
Place of death Berlin