Fritz Sternberg

Fritz Sternberg (born June 11, 1895 in Breslau , † October 18, 1963 in Munich ) was a German Marxist theorist, economist , sociologist and socialist politician.

Life

Youth and Studies

Fritz Sternberg was born on June 11, 1895 as the fifth child of a Jewish educated middle-class family in Breslau. As a thirteen-year-old high school student he came into contact with socialist ideas for the first time , and from 1910 onwards he occasionally wrote articles for the local social democratic daily Die Volkswacht . At the same time he joined the Jewish youth movement and came into contact with Martin Buber . After graduating from high school, Sternberg began to study economics in 1913, first in Breslau, then in Berlin, during which time he worked in various socialist- Zionist organizations. The beginning of the First World War , which Sternberg assessed as an imperialist war, and the approval of the war credits by the Social Democratic parliamentary group in the Reichstag led to an alienation from the SPD. In May 1916 Sternberg was drafted into the military, in occupied Poland he came into contact with the federal government , in August 1917 he succeeded in obtaining a leave of absence for a doctorate ( The Jews as Carriers of a New Economy in Palestine ), which he obtained in the same year completed. In the following years until around 1922 Sternberg was part of the Zionist-socialist Poale Zion . He experienced the November Revolution in his hometown and was a member of the soldiers' council there .

Weimar Republic

After a long stay in Vienna in the summer of 1919 (during which he also dealt with psychoanalysis , among other things ), he took up a position at the seminar of Franz Oppenheimer at the University of Frankfurt in the winter semester of 1919/20 , where he did research until 1923 (among others on the cooperative system and on marginal utility theory) as well as taught. A failed habilitation attempt and disputes with Oppenheimer prompted Sternberg to give up his university career and to devote himself to studies on the analysis of imperialism from 1923 onwards , at the same time he moved away from Zionism after taking part in the Zionist Congress in Karlsbad in 1921 . Sternberg now moved back to Breslau, also for financial reasons, where he set up a Marxist discussion group (the nucleus of the later SAPD local group) and worked on his book Der Imperialismus , which was published at the end of 1926 .

During this time Sternberg's contacts intensified with well-known artists such as Bertolt Brecht , Lion Feuchtwanger or George Grosz as well as with various Marxist circles and personalities. After Karl Korsch , Sternberg was probably the person who decisively shaped Brecht's reception of Marxism . The discussions about imperialism gave Sternberg the opportunity to regularly write articles for various publications of the labor movement and to hold seminars and courses for trade union members and officials, among others . In 1927 Sternberg took part in the anti-imperialist congress in Brussels, in 1929 and 1930 he was twice in the Soviet Union , where he discussed with Eugen Varga , Karl Radek and Nikolai Bukharin , and his impressions there reinforced his criticism of Stalinism . From 1930 until it was banned in March 1933, Sternberg wrote regularly for Die Weltbühne , mostly under the pseudonyms Thomas Tarn and KL Gerstorff . During this time he worked together with Hans Mayer and Richard Löwenthal .

On November 7, 1931, Sternberg joined the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD), which had been founded a few weeks earlier, and for which he was almost non-stop over the next few years despite the onset of diabetes. Sternberg appeared as a speaker at SAPD rallies, organized internal training courses and courses, wrote articles for the party press and ran (unsuccessfully) in the Prussian state elections in 1932 on the first list in the Berlin constituency. Together with Klaus Zweiling , he wrote a draft program for the first party congress of the SAPD, the economic analyzes of which were largely accepted. Within the party, he belonged together with Zweiling, the former KPDO members around Paul Frölich and Jacob Walcher and the leadership of the SJVD to the left wing of the party, which wanted to develop the SAPD into a revolutionary-Marxist party and, in early 1933, opposed the liquidation course of the left-wing social democratic-pacifist party leadership to Max Seydewitz and Kurt Rosenfeld .

Exile and the post-war period

Since Sternberg was particularly at risk as a Jew and Marxist after the transfer of power to the NSDAP , he went into hiding after the fire in the Reichstag and on March 12, 1933, disguised as a winter sportsman, escaped from Germany across the Giant Mountains to Czechoslovakia , from where he traveled to Basel . There he spent the next three years under economically and legally precarious conditions and from there organized support for the illegal work of the SAPD in southern Germany. At the end of August / beginning of September 1933 he met Leon Trotsky , who was temporarily exiled there, in Royan , France ; The main topic of discussion was the analysis of imperialism, but also the construction of a revolutionary Fourth International . In his book “Fascism in Power”, written in 1934, he predicted that the world was facing a new world war , for which he identified two possible constellations. Either an "overall imperialist war against Soviet Russia" or "On the one hand, for example, Japan, Germany, Italy and satellites, on the other hand France, the United States with satellites and Soviet Russia".

In the spring of 1936, Sternberg was expelled from Switzerland and moved to Paris, where the exile board of the SAPD was based. During this time Sternberg took part sporadically in the committee for the preparation of the German Popular Front , until the defamation of the SAPD by the KPD as a Gestapo agency made it impossible to work. In the years up to 1939, Sternberg was also one of the main authors in the SAPD newspapers Die Marxistische Tribüne and Die Neue Front - Organ for proletarian-revolutionary collection , regular articles also appeared in the Neue Weltbühne and in bourgeois journals such as the St. Galler Tagblatt and the Economist .

In May 1939 Sternberg entered the USA on a tourist visa, and after the outbreak of war his residence permit was extended by six months until he received an immigrant visa in 1943 and US citizenship in 1948 . During this time he worked on the one hand as a freelance journalist (including for The Nation and The New Republic ), on the other hand he researched the German war economy with financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Brookings Institution . In 1944 he was one of the co-signers of the program of the Council for a Democratic Germany initiated by the socialist theologian Paul Tillich , at the same time he maintained close contacts with important left-wing American trade union leaders such as Victor Reuther and David Dubinsky, which enabled him to hold trade union training courses. Lectures and seminars at various universities contributed to his livelihood until the end of the 1950s.

In 1950, Sternberg returned to Europe for the first time since 1939, where he spoke as a representative of the American socialists at the international socialist rally on August 20 in Frankfurt / Main. In 1951 he went on a three-week trip to Yugoslavia, where he discussed with Edvard Kardelj , among others . From 1954 onwards, Sternberg's center of life (while retaining American citizenship) moved back to Europe.In the years that followed, until his death in 1963, he was active as a speaker primarily in trade unions, in working groups on the left wing of the SPD and in the SPÖ .

Commemoration

Stumbling block at the house, Zolastraße 1a, in Berlin-Mitte

In May 2006 a stumbling block was laid in front of his former home, Berlin-Mitte , Zolastraße 1a .

Fonts

• The Jews as carriers of a new economy in Palestine. A study . Vienna 1921.
• Imperialism . Berlin 1926.
• Imperialism and its critics . Berlin 1929.
• A science revolution? Critique of the book by Henryk Großmann: The law of accumulation and collapse of the capitalist system. At the same time a positive analysis of imperialism . Berlin 1930
• The decline of German capitalism . Berlin 1932.
• Fascism in power . Amsterdam 1935.
• Germany and a Lightning War . London 1938.
• From Nazi Sources. Why Hitler can't win . New York / Toronto 1939.
• The German war strength. How long can Hitler wage war . Paris 1939.
• The coming crisis . New York / Toronto 1947.
• How to stop the Russians without war . New York / Toronto 1948.
• Living with the Crisis. The Battle against Depression and War . New York 1949.
• Capitalism and Socialism before the Last Judgment . Hamburg, 1951.
• Capitalism an Socialism on Trial . New York 1951.
• The End of a Revolution. Soviet Russia - From Revolution to Reaction . New York 1953.
• Marx and the present. Development tendencies in the second half of the twentieth century . Cologne 1955.
• The military and the industrial revolution . Berlin / Frankfurt am Main 1959.
• Who rules the second half of the 20th century? Cologne / Berlin 1961.
• The poet and the ratio. Memories of Bertolt Brecht . Göttingen 1963 (new edition with commentary: Frankfurt a. M. 2014).
• Notes on Marx - Today . Frankfurt am Main 1965.

literature

• Helga Grebing (Ed.): Fritz Sternberg - For the Future of Socialism (series of publications by the Otto Brenner Foundation No. 23), Frankfurt am Main 1981.
• Sven Papcke : German sociology in exile. Diagnosis of the present and critique of epochs 1933–1945 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-593-34862-4 (including Chapter II: Theory of Crisis or Crisis of Theory? Pp. 38–58).
• Helga Grebing and Klaus-Jürgen Scherer (eds.): Arguing for a world beyond capitalism. Fritz Sternberg - scientist, thought leader, socialist. Paderborn 2017
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Saur, Munich 1980, p. 734

Web links

Commons : Fritz Sternberg  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about Fritz Sternberg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Are tensions growing between China and the Soviet Union? Article by Fritz Sternberg from the trade union monthly issues 3/1960

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fritz Sternberg, Der Faschismus an der Macht, Hildesheim 1981, p. 216. (Reprint of the Amsterdam 1935 edition)