Kurt Sauerland

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Kurt Sauerland (born January 12, 1905 in Cologne , † March 22, 1938 in Moscow ) was a German communist politician, journalist and writer who was arrested and executed during the Stalin purges .

Life

The son of a senior postal clerk studied economics, history and philosophy after finishing secondary school. In 1923 he joined the KPD , where he worked in the intelligence service from May 1923 to early 1927. From the summer of 1927 to the summer of 1928, Sauerland worked in the state executive committee of International Workers Aid (IAH) in Cologne and in the local executive committee of the League against Imperialism and for National Independence .

In 1928 he married the communist Friedel Lange , with whom he had a son ( Karol Sauerland ). In October 1928 he was appointed head of the International Social Policy Archive at the Central Committee of the IAH. From March 1929 to January 1931 he was a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the IAH. In May 1929 he became editor-in-chief of the magazine Der Rote Aufbau , which appeared in the Munzenberg Group . During a stay in London he was arrested and expelled. From October 1931 he was officially a member of the Reich Executive Committee of the IAH. Sauerland is one of the KPD's chief Stalinist ideologues. In 1932 he published the pamphlet The Dialectical Materialism , with which the Hungarian communist Gyula Alpári , among others, dealt critically and which was reprinted in 1978 by the new left .

Emigration from the Third Reich

After the transfer of power to the NSDAP , Sauerland and his wife emigrated to Paris at the end of March 1933 . There he worked as an editor of the magazine Our Time and at the same time as a freelance writer. In August 1934 he went with his wife to the Soviet Union, where the honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was recognized as an emigrant. Under the party name "Karl Stockinger" he worked for the publishing house of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in the department of the Hungarian communist Béla Kun . Like many emigrants, he lived with his wife and son, born in 1936, in the Moscow Hotel Lux .

Victim of stalinism

Kurt Sauerland was arrested during the Great Terror on May 15, 1937 as part of the Stalin Purges , sentenced to death on March 22, 1938 by the military tribunal of the Supreme Court of the USSR for "participating in counterrevolutionary terrorist activity " and shot on the same day.

Works

  • Rudolf Feistmann : The SPD apparatus. 300,000 items to be awarded . With an afterword by Kurt Sauerland. Publishing house of the Central Committee of the IAH, Berlin 1929 (supplements to "Red Structure" 2)
  • Bankrutstvo burzuaznoï filosofiï. Filosofija kapitalizmu dobi zanepadu . Pereklav O. Soboliv. Edited by Petra Demcuka. Proletar, Charkiv, Kiïv 1931 (uniform title: The bankruptcy of bourgeois philosophy )
  • Dialectical materialism . Vol. 1. Creative or dogmatic Marxism? New German publishing house, Berlin 1932 (Universum library for everyone)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Leonhard : The revolution dismisses its children . 15th edition. Ullstein, 1976, p. 44-45 .
  2. ↑ Gyula Alpári : Critical remarks on Kurt Sauerland's "Dialectical Materialism" . 1932, DNB  820660299 .
  3. ↑ Dialectical Materialism / Kurt Sauerland . Revolutionary Way Group, Frankfurt am Main 1978, DNB  550399046 (reprint of the Berlin edition, Universum-Bücherei für Alle , 1932).
personal data
SURNAME Sauerland, Kurt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stockinger, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD), journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1938
Place of death Moscow