Isaac Deutscher

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Isaac Deutscher (also: Isaak Deutscher ; born April 3, 1907 in Chrzanów , Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; † August 19, 1967 in Rome ) was a Polish - British writer, journalist and historian of communism of Jewish origin.

Life

Isaac Deutscher came from a Jewish Orthodox family. His ancestors had emigrated from Fürth to Galicia in the 16th century .

The young German was brought up according to the principles of Orthodox Judaism , learned the Torah , Talmud and the Hebrew language and initially showed an interest in Zionism . Around the time of his bar mitzvah , however, he lost his faith when, in order to “test God”, he ate unkosher food at the grave of a tzaddik and subsequently, when nothing happened, became an atheist . At the age of 16 he published Yiddish and Polish verses, mostly mystical in content, in a Polish literary magazine and translated Hebrew, Latin, German and Yiddish articles into Polish . Until 1939 he earned his living mainly as a proofreader.

In 1926 he joined the Communist Party of Poland , which had been pushed underground under Pilsudski's military dictatorship. During his military service in 1929/30, he agitated for the party. He published a Yiddish socialist newspaper and wrote for the communist press. In 1932 he was expelled from the party because, from their point of view, he exaggerated "the danger of Nazism" and "spread panic in the ranks of the communists".

Deutscher was then a member of the Left Opposition of the Polish Communist Party, which temporarily joined the Left Opposition in the USSR led by Leon Trotsky . When Trotsky founded the Fourth International in September 1938 , the Polish group voted against it at the founding congress. In their justification, the two delegates followed Deutscher's argumentation, who rejected this step as "premature". Deutscher subsequently left the group and never rejoined a political party.

In August 1936 Deutscher wrote a pamphlet entitled The Moscow Trial about the first Moscow trial , in which he exposed the methods and content of the show trial organized by Stalin . In April 1939 he left Poland and went to London as a correspondent for a Polish newspaper. Deutscher began there to write political comments in which he criticized Stalin's foreign policy and its war aims from a socialist position.

In the autumn of 1940, Deutscher reported to the Polish army in exile under the leadership of Władysław Sikorski , which had military bases in Scotland under its own sovereignty. There he was sent as a suspect to an internment camp run by the Polish government-in-exile, where predominantly political suspects, homosexuals and Jews were represented. According to German biographer Ludger Syré, the Ladybank camp near Kircaldy was "not an actual prison camp", but the intention was to "keep him quiet" as a "dangerous red rebel" and "let him drag heavy boxes of ammunition". Deutscher used his stay in the camp to learn the English language and he set up a "translator service" in the camp to organize the latest news.

In early 1942 he was discharged from the army and went to London in February of the same year, where he worked as a journalist for the leading English weekly newspapers The Observer (1942–1947) and The Economist (1942–1949). During the Second World War, his parents and two of his siblings were deported by the National Socialists to Auschwitz and killed there. In 1947 he married the journalist and secretary of the Polish Union of Journalists, Tamara Frimer . With the start of the Cold War (1946), Deutscher largely turned away from daily journalism and began major historical research. In 1949 he published his Stalin biography, which has been translated into 12 languages. Between 1954 and 1963 his main work, the three-volume biography of Trotsky, was published .

In the mid-1960s, Deutscher took part in the “ New Left ” against the Vietnam War and took part in the work of the “ Russell Tribunal ”. He was visiting professor at several US universities and one of the prominent representatives of the so-called teach-in movement after the beginning of the Vietnam War .

In memory of Isaac Deutscher, the German Memorial Prize has been awarded annually since 1969 for outstanding Marxist-oriented publications.

Works (first editions in German)

  • Stalin. The history of modern Russia , Zurich 1951
  • Stalin. A political biography , Stuttgart 1962 (Original: Stalin, a Political Biography (1949)), complete new edition with one chapter added, 2 volumes, Berlin 1978, ISBN 3-88395-401-2
  • Trotsky , Stuttgart 1962–1963 (3 volumes), German by Harry Maòr (Original: The Prophet Armed (1954), The Prophet Unarmed (1959) and The Prophet Outcast (1963))
  • The unfinished revolution. 1917–1967 , Frankfurt / Main 1967 (Original: The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967 (1967))
  • Lenin's childhood , Frankfurt / Main 1973
  • Marxism and the USSR , Frankfurt / Main, 1974
  • The unsolved Jewish question. On the dialectic of anti-Semitism and Zionism , Berlin 1977
  • Reports from post-war Germany , Hamburg 1981
  • Independent communists. The correspondence between Heinrich Brandler and Isaac Deutscher 1949 to 1967 , Berlin 1981, edited by Hermann Weber
  • Between the blocks. The West and the USSR after Stalin , Hamburg: Junius, 1982, ISBN 3-88506-119-8
  • The Gentile Jew. Essays , Berlin: Rotbuch-Verlag 1988, ISBN 3-88022-726-8 .

Other works

  • The Moscow Trial , 1936
  • Russia and the West , 1960
  • The Non-Jewish Jew. And Other Essays , 2017 (first 1968)
  • The Russian Revolution . In: The New Cambridge Modern History , Vol. 12, 1968

literature

  • Ludger Syré : Isaac Deutscher. Marxist, publicist, historian. His life and work 1907–1967. Junius-Verlag, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-88506-130-9 ( series of research reports ).
  • David Caute: Isaac & Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic . Yale University Press, New Haven 2013. ISBN 978-0-300-19209-4 (via Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tamara Deutscher: Isaac Deutscher 1907-1967 . In: Isaac Deutscher: The Non-Jewish Jew and other essays , London 1981, p. VIII.
  2. ^ Helmut Dahmer : Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967). A skeptical Trotskyist , SoZ - Sozialistische Zeitung , May 2007, accessed on May 25, 2019.
  3. ↑ Neil Davidson: Isaac Deutscher: the prophet, his biographer and the watchtower, International Socialism, Issue 104, October 2004, accessed May 25, 2019.
  4. ^ The Jewish Chronicle, Life inside the concentration camps of Scotland
  5. ↑ Ludger Syré : Isaac Deutscher. Marxist, publicist, historian. His life and work 1907-1967 , Hamburg 1984, pp. 66–67.
  6. ↑ deutscherprize.org.uk
personal data
SURNAME German, Isaac
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Jewish Marxist writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Chrzanów
DATE OF DEATH 19th August 1967
Place of death Rome