Heinrich Cunow

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Heinrich Cunow (born April 11, 1862 in Schwerin ; † August 20, 1936 in Berlin ) was a university lecturer ( ethnologist ), editor , politician ( SPD ) and an important Marxist theorist. In 1919 Cunow was a member of the Weimar National Assembly for the SPD and a member of the Prussian state parliament from 1921 to 1924 .

Life

Heinrich Cunow was born as the son of a stage worker in Schwerin. With financial support from a relative, he was able to attend high school. Then he did a commercial apprenticeship in Hanover . After completing his apprenticeship, he worked as an accountant in a wallpaper factory in Hamburg . There he began to be politically active within the SPD. As an autodidact , he studied Marxism and the philosophy of Kant and Hegel .

From 1898 Cunow was editor of the journal Die Neue Zeit , the scientific organ of the social democracy edited by Karl Kautsky . In addition, he worked from 1902 as an editor of the SPD central organ Vorwärts , where he was next to Heinrich Ströbel as a spokesman for the anti- revisionist left and turned against Kurt Eisner . From 1907 he worked as a lecturer at the SPD party school in Berlin, alongside Franz Mehring , Rudolf Hilferding , Rosa Luxemburg and Heinrich Schulz . In addition, Cunow carried out scientific studies in the field of ethnology at an early stage , to which he applied the Marxist method .

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In August 1914, Cunow, like his editorial colleagues in Vorwärts, was still against the approval of war credits . From mid-October 1914 he changed this assessment and joined the opinion of the SPD majority around Friedrich Ebert ; From 1915 the Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch group was formed within the SPD, which tried to justify the position of the party majority on the subject of war credits in a Marxist way, while developing the theory of " war socialism ". Cunow published in the Hamburger Echo and other SPD party newspapers. From mid-1915, Die Glocke , a magazine founded by Parvus , became the organ of the group. Later, Sigmund Neumann Cunow's writing held Party collapse ? from 1915 for a concise expression for the existence of social-imperialist tendencies in social democracy, ie "an imperialist policy aimed at by and for the working class".

In October 1917, the USPD split from the SPD, without Cunow. He succeeded Karl Kautsky in the Neue Zeit , which he headed until she was hired in 1923. In 1919 Cunow was an SPD member of the National Assembly and later from 1919 to 1924 a member of the Prussian state parliament. He became a member of the program commission of the Görlitz program of the SPD, but then withdrew more and more from active party politics.

In 1919 Cunow accepted the call from the Berlin University and was appointed Associate Professor of Ethnology by Konrad Haenisch , who has since become the Prussian Minister of Culture . He published numerous ethnological works and a four-volume economic history . He became important as a state theorist : in 1920 and 1921 he published his main work: Marx's theory of history, society and the state in two volumes. In it, contrary to Marx, he represented the possibility of the development of the state in the course of a peaceful "social revolution " towards a social administrative state . He rejected the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 as a voluntaristic takeover of the state, regardless of the level of development of Russian society.

In 1933, after the NSDAP “took power ” , Cunow lost his pension and his writings were publicly burned. On August 20, 1936, he died impoverished and forgotten in Berlin.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franz Neumann: Behemoth. Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1984 (first: Oxford University Press 1942, 1944), ISBN 3-596-24306-8 . P. 262.

Publications

  • The Australian Negro Kinship Organization , 1894
  • The social constitution of the Inca Empire , 1896 ( full text )
  • Theological or ethnological history of religion? , 1910
  • The technology in primeval times , [1912] 1921 (2nd edition)
  • The origin of religion and belief in God , [1913] 1924 (5th edition)
  • On the prehistory of marriage and the family , 1913
  • Party collapse? An Open Word on Internal Party Disputes , 1915 (digitized version)
  • Marx's theory of history, society and the state. Basics of Marxian Sociology , 2 volumes, [1920 + 1921] 1923 (4th edition). Volume 1: online and Volume 2 online at Archive.org .
  • "Klassekampftheorie", in: Jahrbuch für Soziologie , H. 2, 1926
  • Technology and economy of the European primitive man. The book circle , Berlin 1927
  • Love and marriage in the life of peoples. The book circle, Berlin 1929
  • History and Culture of the Inca Empire , 1937 ( posthumous ).

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Heinrich Cunow  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Cunow, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ethnologist, state theorist and politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 11, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Schwerin
DATE OF DEATH August 20, 1936
Place of death Berlin