Karl Volk

Karl Volk (born April 1, 1896 in Schowkwa , Galicia , † March 1961 in New York , NY , also Robert Volk or Robert Rintel ) was a German communist politician, journalist and anti-fascist resistance fighter .

Life

The people, who came from a Galician Jewish merchant family, grew up in Prostějov in Moravia , where they attended grammar school and, after studying economics and philosophy at the Charles University in Prague, joined the socialist - Zionist Poale Zion and joined the Communist with their left wing in 1921 Party of Czechoslovakia . In the same year he went to Soviet Russia and worked at short notice in the Soviet diplomatic service as a secretary at the embassy in Beijing and in the Soviet Russian press office in Vienna . The end of 1922 moved people to Germany over where it under the pseudonym Robert full-time functionary of the KPD was, he was from 1923 to 1924 political head of the party district of Lower Saxony and acted during the Hamburg Uprising as a political commissar . After a short period as an employee of the Comintern in Moscow , he headed the KPD daily newspapers “Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung” in Leipzig and “Der Kämper” in Chemnitz from 1924 to 1925, and from 1926 the central “KPD press service” in Berlin .

Originally belonging to the left wing of the party around Ruth Fischer , Arkadi Maslow and Ernst Thälmann , Volk developed around 1928 into a leading member of the inner-party movement of the Compromisers , who rejected the ultra-left line of the Thälmann leadership ( RGO and social fascism policy ) and therefore became Released from his previous functions and transferred to Hamburg , where he initially headed the "Hamburger Volkszeitung", but was also released from this position after the Wittorf affair . In 1929, after the "Compromisers" had been disempowered within the party, he secretly continued the activity of the parliamentary group and, together with Georg Krausz and Heinrich Süsskind, began to build a Compromisers organization within the Berlin KPD.

After the takeover of the Nazi Party in 1933, the "Versöhnlergruppe" took to the people, to which the young Heinz Brandt was one in which illegality the fight against the Nazi regime and focused here on the service work. Here as in exile , Volk maintained close contacts with social democratic and socialist groups such as Neu Beginnen and the Revolutionary Socialists of Germany . Volk himself had to flee to France as early as 1933 and in the same year took part in the “Compromisers' Conference ” in Zurich . His hope that the KPD could be reformed was initially reinforced by its turning away from the ultra-left line in 1934 and by the VIII Comintern Congress in 1935; Disaffected by the Moscow trials and especially the execution of Bukharin , he finally broke with the KPD in 1938. After the outbreak of war , he managed to escape to the USA , where he lived illegally until the end of the war and then worked as a publicist specializing in Soviet issues . During this time, Volk maintained political contacts with the SPD without joining it.

Works

• Pattern for World Revolution. Chicago / New York 1947 ( Author / editor of the book published under the pseudonym Ypsilon with Julian Gumperz )

literature

• Volk, Karl (Robert) . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Volk in the catalog of the German National Library