Ernst Drahn

Ernst Eduard Carl Drahn (born March 25, 1873 in Stargard , † 1944 in Berlin ) was a German archivist and writer.

The hotelier's son had to leave the grammar school after the death of his father and began an apprenticeship in Nauen in 1888 . After a time as a clerk and in the military, he went to Berlin, where he worked as an auditor and lecturer at the Institute for German Accounting. He dealt with the social question and political economy . From 1907 he worked regularly for the magazine “Der deutsche Buch- und Zeitschriftenhandel” and as a publisher's editor, despite the lack of training. Around 1912 he came closer to the SPD and studied their writings. At the beginning of 1915 he was drafted and used in the Nyemen Army , then in Prenzlau until he was retired in 1917. Since then he has been the SPD's advisor for history and military affairs. He replaced Eduard David as head of the party archives, which he enriched with numerous documents from the revolutionary period by the end of 1919. He worked with Susanne Leonhard , who moved him to join the KPD , which ended his work for the SPD. A publication of the Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International on Friedrich Engels , which appeared in 1920, contained unpublished Engels letters from the archive; Drahn had suppressed them. A house search provided the evidence.

Drahn worked as a specialist for the Prussian State Library . In 1923 Drahn left the KPD and joined a national Bolshevik movement around Emil Unger-Winkelried , which was moving closer to the Hitler movement. In 1925, Drahn left the State Library to work as a freelance writer for various conservative newspapers. Together with Gottfried Zarnow , he accused the Social Democrats of lacking nationalism and joined the NSDAP in May 1933 . In 1934 he became a librarian at the German Labor Front (DAF) and head of the press archive of the Reich Iron and Metal Works Group. In 1937 he switched to the Labor Science Institute of the DAF as a lecturer . In 1941 he was expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer because he was no longer a full-time writer. The circumstances of his death in Berlin-Steglitz in 1944 are unclear.

Fonts

• German social democracy. Become, want, work , Munich 1926
• Marx bibliography: a picture of Karl Marx's life in biographical-bibliographical data , 1923, repr. 2017
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the dictatorship of the proletariat: In addition to statements on the tactical attitude of the d. Communists in: 1. a revolution in which "pure democracy" wins the upper hand, 2. the proclamation of the dictatorship of the proletariat , Leipzig 1920, repr. 2016
• The archive of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, its history and collections , Leipzig 1920 repr. 2017
• Revolution chronicle of the years 1914–1920 , Leipzig 1920

literature

• Peter Gohle: Ernst Drahn (1873-1944) . In: Preserving - Spreading - Enlightening: Archivists, librarians and collectors of the sources of the German-speaking labor movement , ed. v. Günter Benser and Michael Schneider, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 2009 online

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Drahn in the catalog of the German National Library