Hans Jaeger (publicist)

Hans Heinrich Ferdinand Jaeger (born February 10, 1899 in Berlin , † October 12, 1975 in London ) was a German political functionary ( KPD ), activist and writer.

Life and activity

Youth and times of the Weimar Republic

Jäger was the son of the sculptor Gotthilf Jäger and his wife Milly, b. Puller. After graduating from high school in 1917, he was drafted into military service.

From 1919 to 1922 Jäger studied history, German , philosophy and economics in Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne. He then hired himself as a publicist and editor.

In 1918 Jäger joined the Spartakusbund . The following year he became a member of the Communist Party of Germany. In 1920 he switched to the KAPD for a short time and then returned to the KPD.

In the early 1920s, Jäger worked as a private teacher and editor for the Wolff Telegraph Office , whose Cologne office he temporarily headed.

In the following years he worked as a functionary in various KPD organizations and worked in various party newspapers. He was also involved in the league against imperialism and in the league of proletarian revolutionary writers.

From 1925 to 1933 Jäger was head of the Marx-Engels publishing house in Frankfurt am Main and (from 1929) in Berlin. During this time he was involved in the publication of the Marx-Engels Complete Edition . In addition, since 1925 he was a member of the staff at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.

In 1929 Jäger was also the organizer of the 2nd Congress of the League Against Imperialism , of which he became Reichsleiter three years later, in 1932. At the beginning of the 1930s, Jäger, who was considered one of the leading ideologues of the KPD, was also temporarily head of department in the agitprop department of the KPD Central Committee and in this position was a leader in activities among intellectuals and in national revolutionary circles. In this capacity he wrote numerous articles for communist magazines.

Nazi era and World War II

A few months after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Jäger emigrated to Prague in March 1933. His father, who was harassed by the new regime on suspicion of helping his son escape, committed suicide in November 1933.

In Prague Jäger published the book The True Face of the NSDAP . During a trip to Moscow in 1934, Jäger turned down the proposed management of the Marx-Engels publishing house in Leningrad. Instead, he resigned from the KPD in 1935 and was expelled from the Comintern's IKK . In the following years he worked for the newspapers Volksrecht in Zurich , Der Deutsche in Polen and Free Germany . In 1937 he took part in the establishment of the German Front against the Hitler regime. Above all, however, he was a leading member of the popular socialists who were establishing themselves in Prague, who were looking for a third way between communism and social democracy: the former viewed them as too Marxist, internationalist and revolutionary, the latter as too reformist. Instead, one had to develop socialism into a people's movement, only in this way, so Jäger's argumentation, could the Nazi regime, which came to power through a people's movement, be overthrown.

Jäger emigrated from Prague in April 1939 with the help of the Czech Refugee Trust Fund via Poland and Copenhagen to London, from where he continued to work actively against the National Socialist regime in Germany until the outbreak of World War II.

Claimed by the National Socialist surveillance organs as a dangerous public enemy, Jäger was placed on the special wanted list by the Reich Main Security Office in the spring of 1940 , a directory of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British island by the German Wehrmacht, were automatically and primarily from special commandos of the SS should be located and arrested.

From June 1940 to March 1941, Jäger was interned as a citizen of a hostile state on the Isle of Man , but then classified as politically reliable by the War Department and released. In the following years he belonged to the Kulturforum in London, a counter-organization to the Communist-dominated Free German Cultural Association. In 1942 he helped found the Constructivist Club. In 1943 he became chairman of the Club 1943 , allegedly in the London borough of Hampstead , a meeting place for German emigrants in Great Britain, especially for writers and intellectuals. He also became a member of the PEN Club. With a view to Germany, he propagated a non-Marxist socialist order with council-republican elements as a model for the internal structuring of the country.

At the end of the war, Jäger approached the SPD. In 1944 he became a British citizen and, after the war, mainly advocated German-British understanding.

post war period

In the post-war period, Jaeger worked as a journalist and correspondent for German and British broadcasters. He wrote for the Deutsche Rundschau, Die Aktion and the Freie Wort. In addition, he went public with various books about the political situation in the Soviet Union and about National Socialism. On his own he also published the Bulletin on German Questions information service from 1949 and, from 1971, the Afro-Asian-Latin American Information correspondence . In addition, he appeared frequently as a lecturer.

Politically, Jaeger characterized himself in the first years after the Second World War - as he now finally rejected communism, but also disagreed with the orientation of social democracy - as a “homeless leftist”. However, he later became a member of the British Labor Party and gradually oriented himself increasingly towards German social democracy. Within the Movement for Colonial Liberation, he campaigned for the independence of the British colonies in Africa and Asia. He was also a member of the Institute for Foreign Affairs .

Jaeger's estate, which was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 1969 , is now kept in the Institute for Contemporary History and in the Federal Archives.

Fonts

• State omnipotence and bureaucracy in the Soviet Union , 1953.
• The Reappearance of the Swastica , 1961.

literature

• Ludwig Eiber : The Social Democracy in Emigration: the "Union of German Socialist Organizations in Great Britain" 1941-1946 and its members. Protocols, declarations, materials. S. XXXV.
• Hermann Weber / Andreas Herbst : German Communists: Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945 , p. 409 .
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 327f.