Boris Goldenberg

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Boris Goldenberg (born August 7, 1905 in Saint Petersburg , † February 10, 1980 in Cologne ), pseudonyms R. Frey , Gilbert and Bernhard Thomas , was a socialist politician , journalist and publicist .

Life

The son of a Russian-Jewish lawyer moved to Berlin in 1914, where he attended grammar school and, after graduating from high school in 1924, studied history, philosophy and sociology there in Freiburg and Heidelberg (doctorate in 1930, contributions to the sociology of the German pre-war social democracy ). In 1924 he joined the SPD , from which he was excluded two years later for contacting the KPD . In the following year he joined the KPD and was active in their student organization Kostufra , of which he was part of the leadership together with Franz Borkenau , Georg Eliasberg and Richard Löwenthal . As a supporter of the "right wing of the party" around August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler excluded from the KPD in 1929, he became a member of the KPO ; in 1932 he belonged to the minority around Jacob Walcher and Paul Frölich , which joined the SAPD in 1932 . Within the SAPD, Goldenberg u. a. for the party organ Sozialist Arbeiterzeitung . Since the beginning of the 1930s he was also active in the disintegration work against ethnic and national Bolshevik groups such as the Consul Organization , the Black Front and the group of social revolutionary nationalists .

After the transfer of power to the NSDAP , Goldenberg was briefly arrested and tortured in March 1933 and, after his release in April, was able to flee to Paris, where he was part of the exile leadership of the SAPD and was active within the SFIO's Gauche révolutionnaire . From 1935 to 1937 he stayed with relatives in the Mandate Palestine and then returned to Paris, where he signed the 1937 popular front appeal of the Lutetia District . While in exile in Paris, he made friends with Willy Brandt , among others . After the defeat of France in 1940 he fled first to the south of France and from there to Cuba in 1941 , where he worked as a visiting professor at the University of Havana . Unlike most other German refugees, such as his party friend Fritz Lamm , he stayed in Cuba even after the end of the war and the opportunities to return that opened up. In 1946 he took on Cuban citizenship. A little later he joined temporarily the part of former members of the Communist Party existing group Movimiento Revolucionario Socialista (MSR) to, for their magazine Tiempo en Cuba , he wrote essays. However, in view of the involvement of the MSR and its leader Rolando Masferrer in the then rampant, gang-like and violent power struggles in the vicinity of the university, he soon withdrew. From 1948 he was employed as a teacher of history, philosophy and French at the Ruston Academy in Havana, a highly regarded private school with an international orientation and student body.

When he recognized the totalitarian traits known to him from the dictatorships of Europe in Fidel Castro's style of government even before his open turn to communism , Goldenberg left Cuba in 1960 and initially settled in London. In 1964 he moved to Cologne, where he headed the Latin America editorial team at Deutsche Welle and worked as a journalist on communism and Latin America and as a translator, among others. a. of the book European Revolution by Eric Hobsbawm .

Boris Goldenberg's estate is in the archive of social democracy .

Honors

Works

  • Contributions to the sociology of the German pre-war social democracy . Berlin 1932
  • Latin America and the Cuban Revolution . Cologne / Berlin 1963
  • Unions in Latin America . Hanover 1964
  • Ten years of the Cuban revolution . Hanover 1969
  • Communism in Latin America . Stuttgart / Berlin / Cologne / Mainz 1971

Items:

in the socialist observation point :

Names in [] are the pseudonyms used in the article

  • [Bernhard Thomas] Explanation [on the harmonization of Austria that has begun], Volume 13, 1938, No. 8 (February 25, 1938), p. 172

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Werner Höfer : If someone was a communist ... Boris Goldenberg - a case and a fate. in: Die Zeit of May 28, 1965, accessed on July 26, 2013
  2. ^ Carlos Widmann : The last book about Fidel Castro. S. 190f, Hanser, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3446240049
  3. ↑ Blurb on Latin America and the Cuban Revolution
  4. ^ Ruston Academy (Havana, Cuba) , in: University of Miami Finding Aids , accessed on July 26, 2013 (English)
  5. ↑ James D. Baker: Ruston: From Dreams to Reality. Ruston-Baker 2007, ISBN 978-1-4257-5678-9 (English)
  6. ↑ FES / holdings and finding aids / bequests and deposits / G to I / Goldenberg, Boris (accessed July 26, 2013)
personal data
SURNAME Goldenberg, Boris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goldenberg, Boris Wladimirowitsch (full name at birth); Frey, R. (pseudonym); Thomas, Gilbert (pseudonym); Thomas, Bernhard (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION socialist politician (SPD, KPD, KPDO, SAPD), journalist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 1980
Place of death Cologne