Josef grinding stone

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Josef "Jupp" Schleifstein (born March 15, 1915 in Łódź ; † July 24, 1992 in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe ) was a German Marxist philosopher , party official ( KPD ) and Marxist-Leninist theorist as well as editor. He also wrote under the pseudonym Egon Schreiner.

Childhood and youth

Schleifstein was born as the second son of the Jewish teacher Hermann Schleifstein and his wife Miriam during their mother's visit in Łódź . Due to the course of the First World War , the mother was not able to return to her father who worked in Leipzig until the end of 1918 . From 1925, Schleifstein attended secondary school and soon stood out for his musical talent. In 1931 the father died. In the same year Josef Schleifstein joined the KJVD , worked in agitprop groups and in 1932 also became a member of the KPD. In 1933 he began studying music at the Leipzig University of Music .

Political activity

From March 1933, Schleifstein worked illegally for his party and resisted National Socialism . In November 1933 he was arrested and in June 1934 because of high treason to 20 months ' imprisonment convicted, he in Waldheim was serving.

emigration

After his release at the end of 1935, he was deported to Poland as a stateless person ; from here he emigrated to Czechoslovakia and worked there illegally for the Central Committee of the KPD. Josef Schleifstein continued his education in circles of emigrants, especially in topics of philosophy and history, joined the Free German Youth and made friends with the musician Gideon Klein .

Four days before the German Wehrmacht invaded in March 1939, Schleifstein fled to London , where he subsequently became active in youth work in exile and became deputy chairman of the Free German Youth . He later worked as an aircraft engine inspector. In his spare time he studied the theories of Marxism-Leninism .

From 1941 on, Schleifstein mainly worked in the educational work of the exile KPD and learned a. a. Kurt Hager and Jürgen Kuczynski know. In 1942 he married Trude Löwenstein and had a daughter the following year. His Jewish-Polish mother, brother and all direct relatives were murdered in the concentration camps of the Hitler regime .

Homecoming

In October 1946, Schleifstein returned to Germany, where he first lived in Cologne and worked as deputy editor-in-chief of the “Volksstimme”, the KPD's district newspaper. In 1948 he became a member of the party executive committee of the KPD and headed its press and training department. In 1949, as secretary of the party executive in the Federal Republic of Germany, he became a member of the internal leadership group, from which he was replaced in 1951 after internal disputes within the party.

Work in the GDR

Schleifstein began his life in the GDR in mid-1951 as a teacher at the SED state party school in Ballenstedt , which he continued at the end of 1951 as a lecturer at the Philosophical Faculty of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig (KMU). In 1956 he received his doctorate on the work of Franz Mehring and received his habilitation in 1958 . From 1957 he was Vice Rector of the Faculty of Social Sciences. His dissertation rehabilitated Franz Mehring, whom Stalin had condemned as "opportunistic" in 1928, as did the Spartacus League of Rosa Luxemburg , Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches .

From 1960 he returned to the party executive of the KPD, which was banned in 1956. At that time he was living in Berlin and became secretary of the party executive for education, theory and propaganda and a candidate for the Politburo . At the same time he was from 1958 to 1963 a member of the People's Chamber for the Kulturbund of the GDR . In 1963 he was a co-founder of the Marxist papers , published in Frankfurt am Main . From 1967 he worked on a new KPD program.

Active in the Federal Republic of Germany

In May 1968, Schleifstein returned to the Federal Republic of Germany and lived first in Cologne, later in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe . He participated in the reconstitution of the DKP in 1968. In the same year he became a member of the party executive committee and co-founder and until 1981 head of the Institute for Marxist Studies and Research (IMSF) in Frankfurt am Main, with which he remained connected until 1990. Together u. a. with Robert Steigerwald and Willi Gerns he developed the theoretical basis for the politics of the DKP in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1988, Schleifstein tried to mediate in the political dispute within the DKP about the political "renewal" of the party, but in 1989, as chairman of the responsible commission, had to determine the failure of the unification efforts.

In 1990, after 22 years of uninterrupted membership, Schleifstein resigned from the party executive committee of the DKP at his own request. In 1991 he became co-editor of Z. Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung after joining the Democratic Socialist Party (PDS) earlier this year .

End of life

Grave: Josef Schleifstein

In the fall of 1991, Schleifstein suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed him. He had to stay in the clinic until May 1992 and died on July 24, 1992 in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe. Josef Schleifstein is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Cologne-Bocklemünd (Hall 29, No. 24).

Honors

In October 1959 Schleifstein was awarded the " Patriotic Order of Merit " of the GDR. In 1976 he received an honorary doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty of KMU Leipzig, and in 1978 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Wrocław . In 1985 he was awarded the GDR Karl Marx Order .

Publications (selection)

also under the pseudonym Egon Schreiner .

  • Marx and Engels in the fight against opportunism , 1953.
  • Franz Mehring . His Marxist work 1891-1919 , Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1959
  • Gerhard Harig, Josef Schleifstein: (Ed.): Natural science and philosophy. Contributions to the International Symposium on Science and Philosophy on the occasion of the 550th anniversary of Karl Marx University Leipzig . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1960.
  • Egon Schreiner: History of the glory of Godesberg . In: Marxistische Blätter 1963 issue 1 (November / December), pp. 12-17. Digitized
  • The September strikes 1969. Presentation - analysis - documentation of the strikes in the steel industry, in mining, in the metalworking industry and in other economic sectors . Frankfurt / Main 1969 (contributions from IMSF 1)
  • Introduction to the study of Marx, Engels and Lenin . CH Beck, Munich 1975. ISBN 3-406-03519-1
  • On some questions of the class struggle and the development of class consciousness in the FRG. Lecture on the occasion of the award of an honorary doctorate from the Karl Marx University in Leipzig . Karl Marx University Leipzig, Leipzig 1977. (Leipzig University Speeches. New Series Volume 42)
  • Practice-oriented Marxist research . In: 10 Years of IMSF Marxist Research for the Labor Movement . Druck Busse GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1978, pp. 9-12.
  • The "social fascism" thesis. About their historical background . Verlag Marxistische Blätter, Frankfurt a. M. 1980.
  • Steigerwald, Robert . In: Philosophers' Lexicon. Edited by a collective of authors . by Erhard Lange and Dietrich Alexander . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1982, p. 865.
  • The communists have to rethink. Perestroika and us. Humanity and class issues . Edition Marxistische Blätter, Düsseldorf 1989. ISBN 3-88501-086-0

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss, Dieter Marc Schneider, Louise Forsyth: Politics, Economy, Public Life. Walter de Gruyter, 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-097028-9 , pp. 650 ( google.de [accessed September 15, 2019]).
  2. ^ Alfred Fleischhacker (ed.): That was our life, memories and documents on the history of the FDJ in Great Britain 1939-1946. Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 1996. S. 194 ISBN 3355014753 .
  3. ^ Franz Mehring. His Marxist work. 1879-1918 . Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1959 (Series of publications by the Institute for History at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. Ed. Ernst Engelberg . Volume 5)


personal data
SURNAME Grindstone, Josef
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grindstone, Jupp (nickname); Schreiner, Egon (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Marxist philosopher and politician (DKP), MdV (Kulturbund)
DATE OF BIRTH March 15, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Łódź , Poland
DATE OF DEATH July 24, 1992
Place of death Bad Homburg vor der Höhe