Karl Korsch

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Karl Korsch

Karl Korsch (born August 15, 1886 in Tostedt in the Lüneburg Heath ; † October 21, 1961 in Belmont , Massachusetts , United States ) is considered to be the most important innovator of a Marxist philosophy and theory in the first half , alongside Georg Lukács , Ernst Bloch and Antonio Gramsci of the 20th century .

Youth and education

As the son of Carl Korsch and Terese Raikowski, Karl had five siblings, four sisters and one brother. His father came from an old farming family who owned a medium-sized farm in Friedland (East Prussia). Since he did not like the rural surroundings and he was looking for a more urban environment and contact with western culture, he moved to Tostedt near Hamburg shortly after his marriage to Terese, where Karl Korsch attended elementary school from 1892 to 1898. Father Carl, who was a clerk at the local court in Tostedt, had developed a great interest in philosophical questions and worked on an extensive, but unpublished work on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 's theory of monads .

When Karl Korsch was eleven, the family moved to Ober Maßfeld , which enabled the children to get an education in the progressive Duchy of Saxony-Meiningen (now Thuringia). From 1898 to 1906 Karl Korsch attended the Bernhardinum grammar school in Meiningen . His father worked at a Meiningen bank, where he eventually rose to become vice director. In addition to reading at school, Korsch studied philosophical works, something his father encouraged him to do. In contrast to his father, a Leibnizian, Karl regarded himself as a Kantian at this time .

During his student days, Karl Korsch regularly attended meetings in the Volkshaus Jena (photo: September 2006)

Between 1906 and 1909 he studied law, economics and philosophy at the universities of Munich, Geneva , Berlin and Jena. There he joined the free student body and was editor of the Jena university newspaper . He often went to meetings in the Volkshaus in Jena .

After the first state examination in law, Korsch was a trainee lawyer in Meiningen from 1909 to 1910. He received his doctorate in 1910 under Heinrich Gerland at the University of Jena with a thesis on the application of the rules on the burden of proof in civil proceedings . In 1910/1911 Korsch did his military service in Meiningen. In 1912 he became a research assistant to Ernest Schuster in London. He joined the Fabian Society and married Hedda Gagliardi there in 1913, with whom he had two daughters. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Korsch returned to Germany and became a soldier. After three weeks at the front, he refused to pick up a gun and made pacifist comments about what he was demoted for.

Revolutionary time and KPD membership

In 1918 Korsch was one of the co-founders of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council in Meiningen , in 1919 he was temporarily a member of the Socialization Commission for Coal Mining in Berlin, in June of that year he joined the USPD and soon belonged to the left wing, which in 1920 supported the Union with the KPD at the party congress in Halle. In addition , he completed his habilitation in October 1919 on law and legal protection in English civil proceedings and initially became a private lecturer in Jena, then at the end of August 1923, against the will of the faculty and university management, initially as an associate professor, and from October 1 as a personal full professor for civil, Procedural and labor law.

In May 1923 he took part in the Marxist Work Week , as the intellectual author of which he can be considered.

From 16 October to 12 November 1923 Korsch Attorney General of the short-lived by the government on November 6 with was Reichsexekution occupied and using the Reichswehr deposed coalition government of the SPD and the KPD in Thuringia. After the military occupation of Thuringia and the dismissal of the state government initiated by President Ebert , Korsch had to go into hiding for a time. because he had called for the formation of proletarian hundreds. After this formative experience of a state government dismissed by the Reich President without resistance, the KPD moved to the left, and Korsch also represented an ultra-left, “Leninist” position in the KPD until he was expelled from the party.

In February 1924 Korsch was elected to the Thuringian state parliament, in July he moved up to the Reichstag , then gave up his state parliament mandate and was re-elected in the elections in December 1924. He took over the function of editor-in-chief of the KPD theoretical organ Die Internationale and in the summer of 1924 took part in the 5th World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. Korsch's attempt to hold an inaugural lecture in Jena in May 1924 and return to the university failed. The new state government ( DVP , DNVP , Thüringer Landbund ) refused to exercise his teaching post, but officially left him with the rights and title of a full professor. Korsch was officially dismissed by the Law to Restore the Civil Service , passed in April 1933 .

Theorists of the independent left

In 1925 Korsch began increasingly to criticize the Stalinization of the Comintern and the KPD and withdrew from the editorial office of the International ; From autumn 1925 attempts began to rally the ultra-left opposition in the KPD, which resulted in the establishment of the KPD internal faction decided left in January 1926 and the monthly magazine Kommunistische Politik in February 1926. The party was expelled on May 3rd of that year. Together with the two communists, Ernst Schwarz and Heinrich Schlagewerth, who were also excluded, Korsch formed the International Communists Group in the Reichstag and in November 1926 joined the Left Communists group in the Reichstag, where he worked with the also excluded MP Werner Scholem . At the international level, Korsch maintained contacts with other left-wing critics of Stalinism such as Amadeo Bordiga in Italy and Timofej Sapronow in the Soviet Union . In 1927 he was the only speaker in the Reichstag to criticize the German-Soviet trade treaty.

Among other things, because of Korsch's support of the declaration of the 700 , an appeal by the more moderate KPD left, Ernst Schwarz was separated and the magazine was discontinued. As a result, the Korsch group until 1933 acted more as a loose association of circles; Contacts were maintained with the SPD left, the Lenin League , the KAPD and the Red Fighters resistance movement . The aim was to work more closely with the left.

At times there was also close cooperation with a left-wing independent trade union, the German Industry Association (DIV), for which Korsch held lectures and courses primarily on labor law issues and for whose newspaper Kampf-Front he wrote several articles. From 1931 he also wrote and discussed regularly in the journal The Opponent, published by Franz Jung and Harro Schulze-Boysen .

During these years, Korsch devoted himself to intensive theoretical studies and discussions. He discussed with Alfred Döblin , Isaak Steinberg and also with Erich Mühsam , Augustin Souchy and others and was a guest at the congress of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT in Madrid in 1931 .

exile

After the NSDAP came to power in 1933 , Korsch first went into hiding , then emigrated to Denmark in the autumn of that year , then to Great Britain and finally in 1936 to the USA . In exile, he worked with Bertolt Brecht , members of the SAPD and councilor communist groups such as the circle around Paul Mattick in the USA. He also devoted himself to intensive theoretical studies (for example on Karl Marx , Michail Bakunin and sociological topics). In 1935 Korsch was slandered by the KPD as a "Trotskyist Hitler agent". In the United States, Korsch received several teaching and research assignments and visiting professorships at universities, including Washington State College in Pullmann and Tulane University in New Orleans, but many of his applications for chairs were rejected for political reasons. From 1956 onwards, a serious illness (decomposition of brain cells) became noticeable at Korsch, and he had to spend the last four years of his life in hospitals and sanatoriums. He died in 1961.

Theoretical approaches and effects

As a law professor who was hardly allowed to teach, he was a social philosopher , with a committed interlude of politicians and parliamentarians. In 1923 he co-founded the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. In contrast to critical theory , he took on a mediating role between the scientific claim of positivism and the socialist theory and practice of the materialist dialectic according to Karl Marx .

In the work Marxism and Philosophy , published in 1923 , which, along with Georg Lukács ' History and Class Consciousness, is one of the most important writings of critical Marxism , Korsch applies the materialist conception of history to Marxism itself for the first time and examines the question of why the German social democracy of the Second . Internationale so “failed” in the revolution of 1918 . Initially intended as an update of Marx's theory in the sense of Lenin's work State and Revolution , Marxism and Philosophy already contains the elements for the fundamental criticism of Leninism in the second edition in 1930.

In 1932 an edition of Marx's Das Kapital edited by Karl Korsch appeared .

Bertolt Brecht regarded Karl Korsch as his teacher in Marxism . Other important students of Karl Korsch were Kurt Mandelbaum , Kurt Brandis , Heinz Langerhans and Erich Gerlach . Karl Korsch's ideas played an important role in the theoretical debate of the SDS in the early and mid-1960s.

Since 1978, on behalf of the International Institute for Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam and the Institute for Political Science at the University of Hanover, Michael Buckmiller has published the complete Korsch edition in Offizin-Verlag in Hanover with the assistance of Götz Langkau and Jürgen Seifert . A total of nine volumes were published there from 1980 to 2016.

Hedda Korsch

Karl Korsch's wife, the reform pedagogue Hedda Gagliardi (1890–1982), was a granddaughter of the feminist Hedwig Dohm . She received her doctorate in 1914 with the work Chaucer as a critic , Berlin, 1916. From 1916 to 1921 she was a teacher with Gustav Wyneken in Wickersdorf . In 1924 she worked for the Soviet trade mission. As a member of the Bund decided school reformers , she was a teacher at Fritz Karsen's Karl Marx School from 1926 to 1933 (before that, Kaiser Wilhelm Gymnasium). In exile in Sweden she worked at the Viggbyholmskolan (reform school of the Quakers ) near Stockholm until 1936 . She then lectured German at Wheaton College, Mass, until 1956. She and her husband took part in the “Marxist Work Week”.

Works (selection)

  • Labor law for works councils. The Works Council Act of February 4, 1922 . Franke, Berlin 1922.
  • Key points of the materialistic conception of history. A source-like representation . Viva, Leipzig, 1922. Reprint Hamburg 1971.
  • Marxism and Philosophy . CL Hirschfeld, Leipzig 1923. (Ed. By Erich Gerlach. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1966.)
  • Karl Marx . Edited by Götz Langkau. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
  • Socialization Writings . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1969.
  • The materialistic conception of history and other writings . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1971.
  • Revolutionary class struggle. The dictatorship of the proletariat and the theory of the state in Marx, Engels, and Lenin . Kollektivverlag, Berlin 1972.
  • Comments on the German "Revolution" and its defeat . Prolit, Giessen 1972.
  • Complete edition. Volume 1: Law, Spirit and Culture . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1980.
  • Complete edition. Volume 2: Council Movement and Class Struggle . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1980.
  • Complete edition. Volume 3: Marxism and Philosophy . Stichting beheer IISG, Amsterdam 1993. ISBN 90-6861-079-1
  • Complete edition. Volume 4: Communist Politics . Stichting beheer IISG, Amsterdam 1994.
  • Complete edition. Volume 5: Crisis of Marxism. Writings 1928-1945 . Stichting beheer IISG, Amsterdam 1996. ISBN 90-6861-084-8
  • Complete edition. Volume 6: Karl Marx . Stichting beheer IISG, Amsterdam
  • Complete edition. Volume 7: Marxism, State and Counterrevolution 1938-1956 . Stichting beheer IISG, Amsterdam
  • Complete edition. Volume 8: Letters 1908-1958 . Stichting beheer IISG, Amsterdam 2001.

literature

  • Erich Gerlach : The development of Marxism from revolutionary philosophy to the scientific theory of proletarian action in Karl Korsch. In: Karl Korsch: Marxism and Philosophy. 3. Edition. Ed. Erich Gerlach. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1966.
  • Richard Albrecht : Korsch's criticism of Pannoekoek. In: The argument. Vol. 14, No. 74, 1972, ISSN  0004-1157 , pp. 586-625.
  • Michael Buckmiller : Marxism as Reality. To reconstruct the theoretical and political development of Karl Korsch. In: Claudio Pozzoli (Ed.): Yearbook of workers' movement. Volume 1: About Karl Korsch. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-436-01793-0 , pp. 15-85.
  • Heinz Brüggemann: Bert Brecht and Karl Korsch, questions about the living and the totem in Marxism. In: Yearbook of the labor movement. Volume 1. pp. 177-188.
  • Douglas Kellner (Ed.): Karl Korsch. Revolutionary Theory. University of Texas Press, Austin 1977, ISBN 0-292-74301-7 , ( full text , PDF file; 11.92 MB).
  • Wolfgang Zimmermann: Korsch as an introduction. Soak, Hannover 1978, ISBN 3-88209-011-1 .
  • Michael Buckmiller (Ed.): On the topicality of Karl Korsch. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main, 1981, ISBN 3-434-00449-1 .
  • Korsch, Karl . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
  • Hermann Weber:  Korsch, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 599 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Michael Buckmiller: The Marx interpretation in the correspondence between Karl Korsch and Roman Rosdolsky . In: Contributions to Marx-Engels research. New episode. Special volume 5. The Marx-Engels editions of works in the USSR and GDR (1945–1968). Argument Verlag, Hamburg 2006, pp. 303-367 ISBN 3-88619-691-7 with 30 letters
  • Matthias Steinbach : The locked gate of the university. Karl Korsch (1886-1961). In: heretics, owls, troublemakers. Outsiders in the university environment. Ed. Steinbach, M./Ploenus, M., Jena / Quedlinburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-932906-84-8 , pp. 288-299.
  • Matthias Steinbach: Marx for high collar proletarians? On Karl Korsch's idea and practice of a Marxist worker education in the Jena microcosm of the former Weimar Republic. In: Touchstone Marx. For the edition and reception of a classic. Edited by M. Steinbach / M. Ploenus, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86331-118-6 , pp. 198-210.
  • Arnold Schölzel : Karl Korsch's "undogmatic Marxism", a contribution to the investigation of the history of the development of philosophical revisionism Diss. HU Berlin 1982.
  • Klaus Vieweg , Achim Seifert , Axel Ecker , Eberhard Eichenhofer : Karl Korsch between law and social science: a contribution to Thuringian legal and judicial history ; Boorberg Verlag Stuttgart 2018. ISBN 978-3-415-06145-3 .

Web links

Commons : Karl Korsch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Contrary to Erich Gerlach's account, The Development of Marxism ... , p. 18, Michael Buckmiller emphasizes that Korsch demanded the unreserved approval of the unification. According to Gerlach's own account, Korsch did not express doubts until 1941. Michael Buckmiller, Marxism as Reality , Yearbook Workers' Movement, Volume 1, About Karl Korsch , Claudio Pozzoli (Ed.), Fischer, Frankfurt / Main, 1973. P. 36 f. So it is not true that in 1920 Korsch articulated "certain reservations about the 21 admission requirements of the Comintern ".
  2. ↑ Matthias Steinbach : The locked gate of the university. Karl Korsch (1886-1961). In: heretics, owls, troublemakers. Outsiders in the university environment. Ed. Steinbach, M./Ploenus, M., Jena / Quedlinburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-932906-84-8 , pp. 288-299.
  3. ↑ Michael Buckmiller: The "Marxist Work Week" 1923 and the founding of the "Institute for Social Research". In: Willem van Reijen , Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Ed.): Grand Hotel Abgrund. Junius, Hamburg 1988, pp. 141-182, here p. 156.
  4. ↑ Michael Buckmiller: Marxism as Reality. In: Yearbook Labor Movement , No. 1, About Karl Korsch , Claudio Pozzoli (Ed.), Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 1973, p. 55.
  5. ↑ Matthias Steinbach : The locked gate of the university. Karl Korsch (1886-1961). In: heretics, owls, troublemakers. Outsiders in the university environment. Edited by Steinbach, M./Ploenus, M., Jena / Quedlinburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-932906-84-8 , pp. 296f.
  6. ↑ David Rjazanov had already applied the method of historical materialism to the life of Marx and Engels in a series of lectures in 1922. See Rjazanov, Marx and Engels - not just for beginners . Rise of Reason, No. 4. Der Funke: Vienna, 2005. Page 181.
  7. ↑ Michael Buckmiller: Dear Götz,… In: Ursula Becker, Heiner M. Becker, Jaap Kloosterman (editor): No obituary! Articles about and for Götz Langkau . IISG, Amsterdam 2003, pp. 35-38.
  8. ↑ Michael Buckmiller: The "Marxist Work Week" 1923 and the founding of the "Institute for Social Research". In: Willem van Reijen, G. Schmid Noerr (ed.): Grand Hotel Abgrund. Junius, Hamburg 1988, pp. 141-182, here p. 150 f.
personal data
SURNAME Korsch, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher, Marxist, MdL and MdR
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Tostedt , Lueneburg Heath
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1961
Place of death Belmont (Massachusetts) , USA