Max diamond

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Max Diamant (born August 5, 1908 in Łódź ; † February 16, 1992 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German journalist , social democratic or socialist party official and trade unionist .

Childhood in Poland

Max Diamant was born in Lodz in 1908 as the son of the Jewish industrial workers Michael and Anna Diamant. Since Lodz was part of a rest of Poland at the time, which had the status of a province, the Weichselland , under the direct rule of the Russian tsarist empire, the Diamant family had Russian citizenship. Because Diamond's parents came from the Galician part of Poland, the Jewish population of which was linguistically oriented towards Austria-Hungary, the family spoke not only Yiddish and Russian, but also and above all German. So Diamant grew up trilingual. From the age of six he attended the elementary school in Lodz. Diamant did the schoolwork in the afternoon for a while in a Jewish workers' education association founded by his father.

In the course of the First World War, remaining Poland was occupied by German and Austrian troops in the summer of 1915. German has now replaced Russian as the official school language. Like many others, Diamond's father was captured by Germany. But because he had refused to do military service in the Russian army, he did not have the status of a prisoner of war, but that of a civilian prisoner. After several months in prison in Berlin, Michael Diamant was released from prison in early 1917 and joined the USPD . A speech he gave on May 1, 1917, in which he was positive about the Russian Revolution, brought him back to prison. This time Michael Diamant was arrested in Warsaw, which was still occupied by German troops. After the defeat of the German Empire and as a result of the Polish Revolution, he was released again at the end of 1918. However, he soon came into conflict with Polish nationalists, who imprisoned him again in early 1919. A few weeks later, this third term was also over.

Moved to Germany, first months in Mannheim and stopover in Zeitz

In order to save her son a life in the heated political atmosphere of Poland and to enable him to continue schooling in German (as a result of the Polish Revolution, Polish had replaced German as the school language), Max Diamant was moved by his parents in mid-1919 Sent to Germany. From then on, Diamant lived with his uncle Hermann Lenz's family in Mannheim and attended the boys' school there. In the meantime he also lived in Ludwigshafen am Rhein . At the beginning of 1920, his parents also managed to leave Poland and, as “political emigrants”, obtain the right to stay in the young German republic. Michael and Anna Diamant soon picked up their son from Mannheim and moved with him to Zeitz in the middle of the year (here the father probably had contacts through his USPD work). Diamond attended elementary school there until 1922. He then completed a two-year traineeship at the state overland center in Saxony-Anhalt in Zeitz-Theißen and also attended the city's commercial training school. Finally, during this time, Diamond's brother was born.

Life and Politicization in the Soviet Union

In autumn 1924, the Diamant family decided to move to the Soviet Union. As a former Russian civil prisoner, Michael Diamant and his family had the right to return there. On the one hand, he sympathized with the Soviet Union, the “model proletarian state”. He had meanwhile converted from the USPD to the KPD and was involved in the Central German uprising of 1921, which was started by communists . On the other hand, Max Diamant had joined the KJVD , probably through his father, and was also positive about settling in the Soviet Union. Ultimately, in addition to ideological motives, perspective reasons certainly played a role for the Diamant family to go to the Soviet Union. Compared to Germany, the "workers and peasants" state of the Soviet Union seemed to offer the young Max Diamant far better and easier access to higher education and studies.

So from the autumn of 1924 the Diamants settled in Leningrad . There Max Diamant was first an officer student in the artillery school of the local artillery academy. At the end of 1926, however, he left school because he had come to the conclusion that service and a career in the military were not what he was striving for in the long term. While his father became a member of the CPSU , Diamant began to be active in the Komsomol in addition to his work in the artillery school . After dropping out of military training, he took his first steps as a journalist and worked as an editor for the German-language youth magazine Die Saat in Charkow until autumn 1927 .

While traveling to Moscow , Diamant learned of the first internal party “purges” of the still young dictatorship of Josef Stalin and came into contact with the surveillance and censorship apparatus of the CPSU himself. He was interrogated by the General Secretary of the Kharkov Communist Party after meeting and talking to members of the opposition who had been banished from Leningrad. He also had to withdraw a report he wrote in The Saat and practice self-censorship. Through these impressions, Diamant developed a critical attitude towards the political system of the Soviet Union. In retrospect, he described the forced self-censorship in particular as a shocking experience that had strengthened his negative attitude towards the Stalin regime. Against this background, and not least because of the psychological pressure that the surveillance and censorship of the Stalin dictatorship exerted on the just nineteen-year-old, Diamant fled to Germany on a ship at the end of October 1927 without an exit permit. His brother was also able to escape with relatives. The mother was refused to leave the country because of the illegal departure of the son. She stayed behind with her father in the Soviet Union.

Back in Mannheim: Entry into the SPD and agitation against the Nazi movement

Back in Germany, Max Diamant lived alternately in Mannheim and Ludwigshafen am Rhein. He soon made his first contacts with the “Socialist Cultural Community”, a discussion and encounter group of Mannheim social democrats under the leadership of Heinrich Stern. The majority of this grouping was part of the new SPD left around Paul Levi , Kurt Rosenfeld and Max Seydewitz . Probably influenced by the “cultural community” and with the firm conviction that he did not want to join any sect but rather have a corresponding place in the German labor movement, Diamant joined the SPD in early 1928 . During the election campaign for the Reichstag elections in May 1928, he was already working for the party secretary of the SPD Mannheim, Ernst Tesslow. Since the middle of the year, Diamant was also a permanent member of the party organ, the Mannheimer Volksstimme , and soon became chairman of the local Jusos . He earned his living as a freelance journalist. In addition to the Volksstimme , he wrote for the Leipziger Volkszeitung, among others .

In the early summer of 1930, Diamant took on a job as a secretary at the war victims organization Reinhold Schönlanks, editor-in-chief of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, in Halle . Among other things, Diamant undertook a trip through the working-class villages of the Vogtland with Schönlank . Here he experienced the first parliamentary breakthrough of the NSDAP , which was the second strongest force behind the SPD and before the KPD in the Saxon state election on June 22, 1930, and saw various marches by the SA . Back in Mannheim he wrote about what he had experienced and called for the establishment of “working groups of young social democrats” which, in addition to the local Reich banner units, were to serve as additional protection against the SA. After the landslide-like victory of the NSDAP in the Reichstag elections of September 1930, these were then brought into being.

In the 1930 summer semester, Diamant began studying at the Mannheim Commercial College and at the same time attended lectures at Heidelberg University, where he has since moved. In 1930 and 1931, Diamant headed the editorial team of the student magazine Der Sozialistische Student in Heidelberg and worked with Golo Mann , among others . At the same time he also carried out a systematic agitation campaign against Adolf Hitler's Nazi movement in the Volksstimme . He attended almost all local NSDAP events and commented on them later in his articles. From the end of 1930 the Jusos Mannheim also held a series of mass events together with Carlo Mierendorff , during which the exiled Italian socialist leader Pietro Nenni appeared as the main speaker and called for the fight against National Socialism in good time so that what happened in Italy would not be repeated in Germany was the takeover of power by the fascist movement under Benito Mussolini .

Transfer to SAP and development of the SAP district of Baden

Since joining the SPD, Diamant had belonged to the left party, whose leading figures were Levi, Rosenfeld and Seydewitz. In retrospect, he described himself as a left young socialist. Like the other members of the SPD left, Diamant was extremely critical of the basic political orientations of the party executive around Otto Wels and Hermann Müller . The main points of contention were the differing views of how the SPD should stand towards the bourgeois capitalist state, the defense program supported by the social democratic Reich ministers ( Panzerschiff A ) and the tactics to be used against the Nazi movement. While Levi, Rosenfeld, Seydewitz and their supporters repeatedly sharply criticized the SPD party executive in their magazines Socialist Politics and Economy and Class Struggle , Diamant and his surroundings did this through the Socialist Student . At the end of September 1931 tensions within the SPD culminated in the expulsion of Rosenfeld, Seydewitz and some sympathizers. The circle of the excluded soon called for a “Reich Conference of the Opposition Social Democrats” during which a new party was to be founded. This conference finally took place on October 4, 1931 and the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAP) was launched, of which Seydewitz and Rosenfeld became chairmen.

Like several hundred others, Max Diamant was not expelled from the SPD, but joined it voluntarily after the SAP was founded. Shortly after the founding party convention of SAP, former Mannheim lawyers around Diamant, Gustav Roos and the brothers Paul and August Locherer set up a local group (OG) for the young party in the industrial city. The Mannheimer SAP-OG soon maintained connections to the local groups in Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Pforzheim, Offenburg and Freiburg, which were also established in the meantime. There were also contacts to local groups in the Palatinate. There was a particularly lively exchange through Karl Nord and Heiner May with the Ludwigshafen branch. The SAP district of Baden was founded a little later than that of the Mannheim branch. Max Diamant became chairman of the district management of SAP-Baden, which had its seat in Mannheim. Diamond's apartment was also the office for the Mannheim branch as well as for the Baden district management.

Years in exile and resistance activity against the Nazi dictatorship

After 1933 he stayed as a political emigrant in a number of European countries and took part in the Spanish Civil War. He was then interned in France and later worked for the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). In the course of the persecution of German communists by the Soviet secret service NKVD , Max Diamond's father, Michael Diamant, who lived in Leningrad, was denounced by Herbert Wehner , arrested in 1937 and shot six weeks later. Diamant managed to escape to Mexico, where he founded a group of German-speaking socialists in 1945.

Return to the Federal Republic of Germany

Since the 1950s, Diamant worked as a correspondent for the SPD and trade union press. He returned to Germany in 1962. Until 1973, Diamant headed the "Foreign Workers" department on the IG Metall board .

Awards

literature

  • Jörg Bremer: The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAP). Underground and exile 1933–1945 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main / New York 1978; ISBN 3-593-32329-X
  • Hanno Drechsler : The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD). A contribution to the history of the German labor movement at the end of the Weimar Republic . Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1965; DNB 450993701
  • Jan Foitzik: Between the fronts. On the politics, organization and function of left political small organizations in the resistance 1933 - 1939/40 with special consideration of the exile . Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1986; ISBN 3-87831-439-6
  • Ursula Langkau-Alex: German Popular Front 1932–1939. Between Berlin, Paris, Prague and Moscow , 3 volumes. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2004/2005; ISBN 3-05-004031-9 (Volume 1), ISBN 3-05-004032-7 (Volume 2), ISBN 3-05-004033-5 (Volume 3)
  • Erich Matthias, Hermann Weber (Hrsg.): Resistance against National Socialism in Mannheim . Edition Quadrat, Mannheim 1984; ISBN 3-923003-27-7
  • Werner Röder, Herbert Arthur Strauss: Biographical Handbook of German-speaking Emigration after 1933 , Volume 1. Saur, Munich 1980; ISBN 0-89664-101-5
  • Manfred Scharrer: Max Diamant - Narrated life story . In: Neue Gesellschaft Frankfurter Hefte 9 (1988), pp. 805-814.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Scharrer: Max Diamant , p. 807.
  2. Scharrer: Max Diamant, p. 808.
  3. Scharrer: Max Diamant , p. 809.
  4. Erich Matthias, Hermann Weber (ed.): Resistance to National Socialism in Mannheim . Mannheim 1984, pp. 211-215
  5. Jörg Schadt (ed.): August Locherer, commitment to the interests of the “little people”. Fifty years active in the union, thirty years in the Mannheim municipal council . Conversations conducted and edited by Klaus Dagenbach, p. 115
  6. ^ A b Max Diamant - socialist, exile, trade unionist . In: H-Soz-Kult, August 31, 2012, accessed June 22, 2015