Franz Marek

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Franz Marek , actually Ephraim Feuerlicht (born April 18, 1913 in Przemyśl , Galicia , † June 28, 1979 in Neukirchen , Upper Austria ) was an Austrian communist politician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Communist Party of Austria ( KPÖ ) and later, together with Ernst Fischer , a representative of Eurocommunism .

Life

Franz Marek was born shortly before the outbreak of the First World War as Ephraim Feuerlicht in what was then Austrian East Galicia . However, his Polish-Jewish family fled the fighting to Vienna, where he grew up in a poor proletarian refugee environment. He did not take the battle name Franz Marek until 1935, when the KPÖ was banned in the Austrian corporate state and could only continue to operate underground. He joined the illegal KPÖ after the February fighting in 1934 with his former schoolmate Jura Soyfer . Both soon became important officials there. Marek led the party's agitation from 1936. When Hitler's troops marched in in March 1938 and the Anschluss of Austria followed, Marek fled abroad. While he and Johann Koplenig came to France, where the leadership of the KPÖ was able to set up their exile office, his friend Soyfer was arrested while trying to flee to Switzerland.

While many anti-fascists fled overseas after the occupation of France , or at least to the south controlled by the Vichy government, Franz Marek stayed in Paris and became one of the most important Austrian communists there. From January 1942 he took part in the armed struggle of the French Resistance and was head of a section of the front in Paris. In contrast to his French comrades, he already had experience from Austria in secret party work from illegality. So he managed to remain undetected for a long time. On August 11, 1944, Marek was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo and was awaiting the imminent execution in the Fresnes Gestapo prison . At the same time, however, allied troops were already advancing on Paris after the Normandy landings and so he survived as a result of the sudden withdrawal of German troops.

After 1945 Marek belonged to the leadership group of the KPÖ, was a member of the Politburo for many years and was considered brilliant, but an ideological hardliner and Stalinist (compared to Viktor Matejka, for example ). Until the Hungarian popular uprising - in his self-view even until the Prague Spring 1968 - he was “blind” to the crimes committed in the Soviet sphere of influence. In the 1960s, Marek, like Fischer, slowly moved to reformist positions, influenced by the Prague Spring and possibly also by his second wife, the journalist Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi , in detail in her memoirs published in 2013 under the heading The Love of My Life reported him. Marek had been married to Tilly Spiegel for the first time, the marriage divorced in 1974. After the crackdown on the Prague Spring by the occupation of the ČSSR in August 1968 and after the hopes of the reformers (or, from the opposing point of view: revisionists ) to implement a line critical towards the Soviet Union within the KPÖ , had failed, Franz Marek tried from 1969 as a Editor-in-chief of the Wiener Tagebuch to pursue an independent left line.

Fonts (selection)

  • France from the third to the fourth republic , Vienna 1947
  • Stalin, man and his work , Vienna 1949
  • Philosophy of the World Revolution , Vienna 1966 (English New York 1969)
  • What Marx really said together with Ernst Fischer, Molden, Vienna 1968
  • Profession and calling communist. Memoirs and key texts , edited and introduced by Maximilian Graf and Sarah Knoll. Mandelbaum, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-85476-659-9 .

literature

  • Maximilian Graf, Sarah Knoll, Ina Markova, Karlo Ruzicic-Kessler: Franz Marek - A European Marxist. The biography , Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2019, ISBN 978-3-85476-690-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Pollack : An undogmatic friend and teacher . In: Franz Marek: Profession and calling communist. Memoirs and key texts , edited and introduced by Maximilian Graf and Sarah Knoll. Mandelbaum, Vienna 2017, pp. 7–9, here p. 8.
  2. ↑ Maximilian Graf, Sarah Knoll: "Profession and calling communist". Franz Marek (1913–1979) - A biographical sketch . In: Franz Marek: Profession and calling communist. Memoirs and key texts , edited and introduced by Maximilian Graf and Sarah Knoll. Mandelbaum, Vienna 2017, p. 18.
  3. ↑ Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss : Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Emigration after 1933 . Vol. 1: Politics, Economy, Public Life . Walter de Gruyter Berlin 1980, p. 475.
personal data
SURNAME Marek, Franz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Firelight, Ephraim (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian communist politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Przemyśl , Galicia
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1979
Place of death Neukirchen , Upper Austria