Josef Guttmann

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Josef Guttmann (born May 23, 1902 in Tábor , † 1958 in the USA ) was a Czechoslovak left-wing journalist and politician of Jewish descent. As a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), he sharply criticized the Moscow trials of the 1930s and was expelled from the party.

Political activity

Guttmann was a member of the KSČ at the end of the 1920s, at a time when not only this party was going through the phase of so-called Bolshevization , i.e. a process of ideological alignment with the official line of the CPSU and the Comintern . He became the leading functionary of the party under the leadership of Klement Gottwald . On November 2, 1928 he was accepted into the Politburo and as such last on VI. KSČ party congress in March 1931 confirmed. Until his dismissal in 1933, he was editor-in-chief of the party newspaper Rudé právo .

The attempt to turn away from the policy of the CPSU occurred in June 1932 on the question of the assessment of social democracy, especially with regard to the danger of fascism in Germany. The KSČ was based on the policy of the so-called united front , while the Executive Committee of the Communist International (EKKI) had been promoting the social fascism thesis since July 1929 . Guttmann, at that time already the second most powerful man in the party alongside Secretary General Gottwald, sharply criticized the German Communists for preventing a united front with German Social Democracy.

KSČ referred to its experiences with the Czechoslovak social democracy ČSSD , in particular to the common struggle against the Sudeten German social nationalists who had grown strong in Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German home front . On the XII. Plenum of the EKKI (from August 27 to September 15, 1932) culminated in a conflict between Guttmann and Ulbricht , which became known as the “Guttmann Affair”.

Guttmann lost his post in the party newspaper and was expelled from the party in 1933 as a Trotskyist dissident. A short time later he became known as a sharp critic of the Stalinist trials in Moscow , especially through two publications, written together with Záviš Kalandra , "Odhalené tajemství moskevského procesu" (The Uncovered Secret of the Moscow Trial) and "Druhý moskevský proces" (The Second Moscow Trial ). In 1937 and 1938 he also tried to set up an alternative newspaper with Kalandra to the party's press, which was loyal to Stalin, but decided to emigrate and traveled to the USA in 1939, where he worked as a radio editor.

Guttmann dealt privately with Jewish history and with the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey, about which he wrote several treatises in the United States and compared them with the Shoah.

Works

  • Kdo jsou a co chtějí likvidátoři , Carl Hoym Nachf., Louis Cahnbley, Hamburg / Berlin 1929
  • Odhalené tajemství moskevského procesu (together with Záviš Kalandra), (self-published) Záviš Kalandra, Praha [1936]
  • Proč je pětiletka pro nás vzorem. Polemika s panem Peroutkou , K. Borecký, Praha 1932
  • Základy Marxovy nauky hospodářské , Komunistické nakl. a knihkupectví, Praha 1925
  • Odhalené tajemství moskevského procesu (The Secret Revealed of the Moscow Trial) - polemic, together with Záviš Kalandra, Prague 1936
  • Druhý moskevský proces (The Second Moscow Trial) - polemic, together with Záviš Kalandra, Prague 1937

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Složení vedoucích orgánů KSČ, a publication of the ÚSTR , online at: www.ustrcr.cz (PDF file; 256 kB), Czech, accessed on December 10, 2010
  2. ↑ Analýza KSČM, ČSSD document, 2003, online at: www.sds.cz , Czech, accessed on December 10, 2010
  3. ^ Karl Bosl, The First Czechoslovak Republic as a Multinational Party State, online at: books.google.com , accessed December 10, 2010
  4. ↑ Milan Churaň et al .: Kdo byl kdo v našich dějinách ve 20. století (Who was who in our history of the 20th century). Libri, Prague 1998, parts 1 and 2, ISBN 80-85983-44-3 and ISBN 80-85983-64-8 , online at: www.libri.cz www.libri.cz , Czech, accessed December 10, 2010
  5. ↑ Zápisky z Frankfurtu 2008 I. (o Turcích, Kurdech a F. Werfelovi), online at: www.iliteratura.cz , Czech, accessed on December 10, 2010
personal data
SURNAME Guttmann, Josef
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Guttman, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak left-wing intellectual and politician
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Tábor
DATE OF DEATH 1958
Place of death United States