Anton Grylewicz

Anton Grylewicz (born January 8, 1885 in Berlin ; † August 2, 1971 there ) was a German communist , later social democratic politician.

Life

Coming from a working-class family, Grylewicz completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith and worked in various metal professions. He joined the SPD in 1912 and joined the USPD in 1917 after it was founded . In 1918/19 he was a leading member of the Revolutionary Obleute and, after the November Revolution , was temporarily deputy to Police President Emil Eichhorn . In this capacity, he also took on the side of the KPD at Spartacus uprising in part. In 1920 Grylewicz became chairman of the Berlin USPD and was part of the majority of the USPD, which united with the KPD to form the VKPD . In the next few years, Grylewicz, who was elected organizational secretary of the KPD for Berlin-Brandenburg, also held various municipal offices for the party. Belonging to the left wing of the party, he took part in discussions on preparations for insurrection in Moscow in 1923 and was elected to the party headquarters in 1924, from May to October 1924 he was also a member of the Reichstag and from December 1924 to 1928 a member of the Prussian state parliament .

In autumn 1925 he was indicted together with Arkadi Maslow and Paul Schlecht before the Reichsgericht in Leipzig, but soon afterwards he was given amnesty. After Stalin's open letter to the KPD in 1925, Grylewicz began to organize the cooperation of the left and ultra-left currents in the KPD and was expelled from the party in April 1927. Until 1928 he acted as chairman of the group of Left Communists (excluded from the KPD) in the Prussian state parliament and at the beginning of 1928 was co-founder of the Lenin League and until 1930 its head of Reich organization. In 1929/30 Grylewicz was the spokesman for the Trotskyist minority in the Lenin League, after the break with its majority around Hugo Urbahns , Grylewicz and others founded the United Left Opposition of the KPD (VLO, later Left Opposition , LO). In this Grylewicz, who had become unemployed in 1930, was a member of the leadership and from 1931 editor of the party organ Permanent Revolution and brochures written by Trotsky .

In March 1933, following the transfer of power to the NSDAP and the fire in the Reichstag , Grylewicz, for whom an arrest warrant had been issued, had to flee to Prague ; his wife, who was temporarily detained, was able to follow suit a few months later. Grylewicz, who no longer held a leadership position in the Trotskyist exile organization IKD , withdrew from politics in 1937 without giving up his political convictions. In November 1937 he was expelled to Norway after the intervention of the Soviet embassy. A little later he returned illegally to Prague, from where he traveled a little later (also illegally) to Paris. He was interned there in 1939 after the outbreak of war until the end of 1941 and was then able to emigrate to Cuba, where he lived until 1955 and worked as a carpenter. In 1955 he returned to Berlin, who had repeatedly suffered from serious illnesses since 1933, where he joined the SPD as a staunch Trotskyist.

literature

• Grylewicz, Anton . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Rüdiger Zimmermann : The Lenin League. Left communists in the Weimar Republic. Düsseldorf 1978, ISBN 3-7700-5096-7 .
• Marcel Bois: Communists against Hitler and Stalin. The left opposition of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. Essen 2014. ISBN 978-3-8375-1282-3 .

Web links

• further information on the life of Anton Grylewicz (with bibliography )
• Anton Grylewicz in the database of members of the Reichstag