Johann Lorenz Schmidt

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Johann Lorenz Schmidt (born December 13, 1900 in Budapest as László Radványi , † July 3, 1978 in Berlin ) was a Hungarian-German communist party official ( KPD ) and economist.

Life

Radványi was born into a Jewish family. He studied economics and philosophy at the University of Budapest in 1918/19 and was involved in the revolutionary student movement. He took part in the anti-militarist Galilei circle and was given lectures at the Budapest Free School for the Humanities , at the u. a. Georg Lukács taught, invited to the Sunday Circle.

After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, Radványi fled to Germany and studied philosophy, psychology, sociology and economics at Heidelberg University from 1920 to 1923 . Here he was with Karl Jaspers Dr. phil. PhD . After working as a bookseller, he was an economist at the Soviet commercial agency in Berlin from 1925 to 1930 . Since 1924 a member of the KPD , he was also an employee of the Central Committee of the KPD and co-founder of the Marxist Workers' School (MASCH) . On August 20, 1925, he married Anna Seghers , who later became known as a writer, and then took the name Johann-Lorenz Schmidt . The couple had two children: in 1926 their son Peter was born, who is now called Pierre Radványi and is a physicist; In 1928 daughter Ruth followed.

Immediately after the Nazi seizure of power , Schmidt emigrated from Berlin with his family to Paris in February 1933 , where he co-founded the Free German University for German students in exile and headed it from 1934 to 1939. After the German troops marched in, he was interned in Le Vernet and Les Milles in 1940.

In 1941, however, he succeeded in traveling to Mexico with his family , where he worked as a university professor at the Universidad Obrera de Mexico and, from 1944, at the National University of Mexico . Like his wife, he belonged to the Heinrich Heine Club , of which Anna Seghers was president. In 1946 he became a Mexican citizen.

Five years after his wife, Schmidt returned to East Berlin in 1952 and became a member of the SED . At the Humboldt University in Berlin , he was given a chair for problems of contemporary imperialism . From 1954 to 1965 he was department head at the Institute for Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR .

Schmidt had been president of the German-Latin American Society, later the GDR-Latin America Friendship Society, since 1961. In 1960 he received the Patriotic Order of Merit of the GDR in silver and in 1971 in gold.

dig

He is buried in the cemetery of the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder communities in Berlin.

Fonts

  • Chiliasm: an attempt to discover the chiliastic idea and chiliastic action . Budapest: Lukács Archívum 1985. Dissertation Heidelberg 1923. ISBN 978-9630165891 . Digital copy, pdf, 7 MB
  • Problems of Neocolonialism: The Peculiarities of West German Neocolonialism . Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1963.
  • The developing countries: origin, location, perspective . Berlin: Verlag Die Wirtschaft 1974.
  • International corporations . Berlin: Verlag Die Wirtschaft 1981.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andreas Herbst:  Schmidt, Johann-Lorenz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 195 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ↑ Neues Deutschland , December 20, 1960, p. 4
  3. ↑ Neues Deutschland, February 27, 1971, p. 2
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Johann Lorenz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Radványi, László; Radványi, Ladislaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist party functionary and economist of Hungarian origin
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH 3rd July 1978
Place of death Berlin