Ernest J. Salter

Ernest J. Salter (1954)

Ernest J. Salter (pseudonym) (* May 8, 1905 in Waren ; † December 5, 1967 in Berlin ; real name: Henri Max Friedrich Johansen ; other pseudonyms: Peter Marum , Theodor Löhrstein ) was a German publicist and author and connoisseur of Soviet Union and communism with an eventful political life.

Life

Ernest J. Salter was born as Henri Max Friedrich Johansen (actually: Johanns) in 1905 in Waren an der Müritz. His father was Louis Friedrich Wilhelm August Johanns, who worked as a carpenter and foreman . His mother Henriette Auguste Matull was before Mamsell's marriage to a commercial councilor .

In 1921, at the age of 16, Salter founded a local KPD group on the market square in his hometown of Waren . At the end of 1922 he moved to Berlin and became an employee of the KPD headquarters. In the spring of 1923 he was sent to Nuremberg , where he was responsible for youth work in the Northern Bavaria district management . He soon became known as a good and radical speaker. He was arrested by the Bavarian police and taken into protective custody for half a year from November 1923 to April 30, 1924 . Since he was considered the “intellectual head of the communist youth in Northern Bavaria”, he was expelled from Bavaria and was banned from living there. After the left wing took over the leadership of the KPD, Salter rose quickly as a young theorist at headquarters in 1924. He joined the group decidedly left , which was led by Karl Korsch and his wife Hedda Korsch , a reform pedagogue and granddaughter of the feminist Hedwig Dohm . The group was an opposition circle close to Trotskyism . Bert Brecht , Alfred Döblin , Susanne Leonhard and Heinz Langerhans took part in the discussions . During this time, Salter and his brothers changed their name from Johanns to "Johansen", also in contrast to their patriarchal father and with the consent of their mother.

In the KPD headquarters in Berlin, the forces that were strictly oriented towards the Comintern and the growing Stalin wing in the CPSU increasingly prevailed . Ruth Fischer , KPD leader from the left wing, was detained in the Soviet Union and ousted, and Ernst Thälmann took over the leadership. The Korsch group itself fell out; when they split in September 1926, Henri Johansen stayed at a Reich conference of his faction at Karl Korsch's side and fought against Ernst Schwarz's supporters . At the beginning of 1926, Salter, like the Korsch group as a whole, was excluded from the KPD due to so-called legal deviation. In 1927/28 the Korsch group disappeared from the political stage after they had sharply criticized the Stalinist development of the Soviet Union , also in the Reichstag . In 1928 Salter became secretary of the association of excluded construction workers in Mönchen-Gladbach . From 1929 to 1933 he worked as a freelance writer and as a permanent employee of the upward , the body of the ADGB . He also worked for other trade union newspapers, above all the German metal workers ' newspaper as the organ of the German metal workers' association . He was also a lecturer at trade union schools and the Marxist Workers' School (MASCH) . In 1928 he joined the SPD .

After the seizure of power

After power was handed over to the National Socialists , the SPD and the trade unions were soon dissolved and Ernest J. Salter became unemployed. He emigrated to Prague , where the Social Democratic leadership into exile had left, and German emigrants under the former editor of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag , Franz Höllering , the Prague lunch had founded.

Salter came back to Berlin after a few months. There he lived illegally at times and participated in the resistance in the group around Bernhard Pampuch and Gertrud Keen . This group had many points of contact with the Emil group around Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and contacts with the Rote Kapelle resistance group . He was interrogated twice by the Gestapo , but they let him go - with the condition that he was required to report to the police  .

Before the birth of his first son in 1934, Salter married his partner Erna Maria Auguste Kakuschke. His wife was an educator, fell under the occupational ban for SPD members in 1933 and had thus lost her job as a trainee at the Prenzlauer Berg district office in 1933. He received support from the greater Berlin community and had to do community work as a corpse washer and street sweeper . Later, through the mediation of a doctor friend, he managed to get a job as a clerk at the main pension office. In 1943 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and joined the cavalry ; behind the front responsible for horse care. He was in Italy, the Czech Republic and Serbia. In May 1945, he fell into Bohemia in Soviet captivity , won the trust of the Soviet commanders and later headed the Antifa -Aktiv, first in Brno , then in Kishinev . In 1946 he was released from captivity and returned to Germany.

Time in Berlin

In Berlin, Salter joined the SED in August 1946 and worked as a freelancer for Ulenspiegel and the Aufbau-Verlag . In 1947 he became editor of the newspaper Berlin am Mittag , with which the Soviet leadership tried to set up a socialist tabloid for the Cold War based on the popular BZ am Mittag . In March 1948, Berlin was liquidated at noon by the Allied Control Council, possibly as a result of an intrigue in favor of the SED's own Vorwärts .

In 1948 Salter left the eastern part of Berlin and went to the west of the city . There he joined the SPD and, through the mediation of Ernst Reuter , whom he knew from the 1920s, was head of the East editorial team of the daily Die Neue Zeitung under the name Ernest J. Salter . It was published from 1947 in West Berlin by the American Information Control Division; he worked there until the paper was discontinued in 1955. Johansen became a member of the German-Russian Freedom Association founded by Ernst Reuter in 1951 , and also worked with Alfred Weiland , who wanted to illegally set up a council-communist group of international socialists . Ernest J. Salter became a close collaborator of the Liberation Committee for Victims of Totalitarian Arbitrariness, founded in 1951 by Margarete Buber-Neumann , and was involved in the context of the congress for cultural freedom . He maintained connections with the American secret service and was active in the gray area between anti-communist organizations and secret services.

Soviet Union Critic

In 1955, through the mediation of Willy Brandt, he became department head for Eastern issues at Sender Free Berlin , which in 1954 had been separated from the NWDR as an independent West Berlin broadcaster . In 1957 he left the dispute there because he had shown solidarity with the station's cleaning ladies during a strike. He then moved to Kasbach am Rhein and worked as a Berlin correspondent for Deutschlandfunk and Deutsche Welle . Under the pseudonym Ernest J. Salter (also Theodor Löhrstein) he appeared repeatedly as a critic of the Soviet Union and Stalinism in the 1950s and 1960s. A public polemic between him and the Soviet economist Eugen Varga found great media interest in 1956. This was also due to the fact that the East-West conflict (" Cold War ") had led to the establishment of a new "Institute for World Economy and International Relations" at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR , one of whose active sponsors was Eugen Varga.

In 1959 he took part in the anti-communist committee, Save Freedom , founded by Rainer Barzel , CDU, and Franz Josef Strauss , CSU. Together with Otto Stolz, the head of the Eastern Europe editorial team at Deutsche Welle, he fought the increasing influence of Herbert Wehner in the SPD after his return from the Soviet Union and his turn to the new policy of the "struggle on two fronts" and "third parties" Way ". Henri Johansen was temporarily excluded from the SPD; but occurred again in the early 1960s. In the mid-1960s he went back to West Berlin and wrote for Die Welt , among others . Since 1950, he has published numerous articles in the magazine The Month and in the cultural magazine FORVM . Both magazines were culturally high-quality discussion platforms for well-known and respected left-wing, liberal and at the same time anti-communist intellectuals and writers . Twenty years after it was founded, in 1967, it turned out to be funded by the CIA . As Ernest J. Salter, Henri Johansen was also a popular speaker.

family

Henri Johansen had four sons and a daughter. He divorced his wife Erna Maria Johansen in 1936 and remarried her in 1940, before the birth of their fourth son. In 1954 they got divorced again. Henri Johansen then married two more times. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack on December 5, 1967 in West Berlin at the age of 62 . His former wife Erna Johansen became a well-known teacher in Berlin in the 1960s. Under the leadership of Grete Sonnemann, she participated in the founding of the New Education working group as early as 1951 .

power

After Wolfgang Leonhard and Richard Löwenthal in the 1950s and 1960s, Henri Johansen was one of the leading German experts on the Soviet Union and communism, an Eastern expert and a commentator on questions of international communism. Above all, he analyzed Soviet foreign and German policy. His numerous publications, articles and lectures made him known as a “Sovietologist” at the time. The eventful life story reflects the contradicting developments of left-wing intellectuals in the pre-war, war and post-war period, who wanted to turn against any form of totalitarianism after 1945 as a lesson from their life experiences . They found their basis of legitimation in the American way, which was increasingly questioned from the 1960s by the left-wing intellectual student movement.

Publications

• From Lenin to Khrushchev, modern communism. Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1958.
• Pocket book of communism in thesis and counter thesis. Bad Godesberg 1959.
• with Otto Stolz: Wehner ante portas, A contribution to the politics of the German social democracy. Echter-Verlag, Würzburg 1959.
• Germany and Soviet Communism, The Probation of Freedom. Piper Verlag, Munich 1961.
• The permanent conflict, the dispute between the communist empires. Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1965.
• as editor: The Unmasking of Stalin - A Shocking Document. Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in Moscow. In: Berlin Voice. Special print, n.d. (1956)

Journal articles (selection)

• Historical concerns. In: The month. Issue 15/1949, pp. 320–323.
• Germany between East and West. In: The month. Issue 21/1950, pp. 313-317.
• The permanent terror. In: The month. Issue 16/1950, pp. 435-439.
• Peoples' prison. In: The month. Issue 24/1950, pp. 600–603.
• Class struggle against the workers: the industrial collective agreements in the eastern zone destroy social progress. In: Special print “Die neue Zeit” 1951.
• The June uprising. A documentary report (part 1). In: The month. Issue 60/1953, pp. 595-624.
• The June uprising. A documentary report (part 2). In: The month. Issue 61/1953, pp. 45-66.
• Walter Ulbricht: Portrait of a Satrap. In: The political opinion. Issue 37/1959.
• Character and perspectives of Soviet communism. In: The month. Issue 197, 1965, p. 96 ff.

literature

• Michael Kubina: Utopia, Resistance and the Cold War: The untimely life of the Berlin councilor communist Alfred Weiland (1906–1978). Lit - Verlag, Münster 2001, ISBN 3-8258-5361-6 .
• Sylvia Kubina: The library of the Berlin councilor communist Alfred Weiland (1906 to 1978) . University library of the FUB, Berlin 1995
• Eugen Varga : History and Politics: Answer to Mr. Ernest Salter. In: Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst (Ed.): From politics and contemporary history. Supplement to the weekly newspaper Parliament". Vol. 24, Bonn 1956, pp. 365-376.
• Gerhard Zwerenz : Heroes' Remembrance Day - Thirteen attempts in prose to take a deferential stance . Scherz Verlag, Munich 1964, pp. 141-163.
• Save your freedom. In: Der Spiegel. 21/1960, p. 16ff.
• Suitcase in Berlin. In: Der Spiegel. 16/1963, pp. 20ff.
• Ernst Reuter: Founding rally of the Freedom Association for German-Russian Friendship on May 13, 1951 in the Städtische Oper Berlin. Berlin 1951.
• Johansen, Henry (Salter) . In: Hermann Weber, Andreas Herbst (Ed.): Handbook of the German Communists . Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

Commons : Ernest J. Salter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ernest J. Salter in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ernest J. Salter in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ernest J. Salter in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of the article freely accessible); Retrieved April 18, 2013.
2. ↑ Thomas Kirschner: The "Prager Mittag" - the short story of an emigrant newspaper ; Radio Prague , April 28, 2007; Retrieved April 18, 2013.
3. ^ Burkhard Zimmermann: Gertrud Keen ; ( Memento of the original from January 31, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Personal archive SPD Berlin; accessed January 18, 2017. 
4. ↑ BAM - Boom. Otherwise BUM. In: Der Spiegel. 10/1948, March 6, 1948, p. 7; Retrieved April 18, 2013.
5. ↑ Eugen Varga: History and Politics: Answer to Mr. Ernest Salter. In: From Politics and Contemporary History. Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, Vol. 24, Bonn 1956, pp. 365–376.