Peter Maslowski (journalist)

Peter Maslowski (born April 25, 1893 in Berlin , † April 24, 1983 in Sommerhausen ) was a socialist politician, journalist and critic of religion .

Life

Peter Maslowski attended a humanistic grammar school in Berlin, where he a. a. noticed that he skipped school to take part in a rally with Karl Liebknecht . Drafted into the military at the beginning of the First World War , Maslowski was seriously wounded in 1915 and after a lengthy stay in the hospital was retired as unfit. After 1917 Maslowski studied history , German and philosophy at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin for a few semesters .

During this time Maslowski joined the USPD and, after leaving the church, joined the free thinkers and was temporarily imprisoned from 1919 to 1920 for his political activities (including on charges of blasphemy ). As a member of the left wing of the USPD, he merged with the KPD to form the VKPD at the end of 1920 , where Maslowski worked as an editor of various newspapers and in 1923 became the Pole Secretary of the Middle Rhine district and in 1924 the editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Socialist Republic in Cologne. Maslowski, who vacillated between the “middle group” and the “left” wing in the faction struggles within the KPD, was elected to the Reichstag in May 1924 for the constituency of North Westphalia , but lost his mandate in the new elections in December of the same year.

In the following years, after several months' imprisonment in Stuttgart, he worked as an editor or editor-in-chief of various regional daily newspapers of the KPD, so in 1926 he headed the class struggle in Halle / Saale and after a nine-month prison sentence in 1926/27 from March to September 1928 temporarily the Ruhr- Echo in food. Re-elected to the Reichstag in 1928, Maslowski was considered the KPD's church and center expert during this period and published various brochures on this subject; his work in the freethinker movement was controversial because he had been advocating a split in the movement in line with the “ultra-left” KPD policy since 1928. After he had written a Thälmann biography for a “bourgeois” publisher in 1932, he came under great pressure within the party and was only able to publish articles in the newspapers and magazines published by Willi Münzenberg .

After the Reichstag fire at the end of February 1933, Maslowski went illegally and in August of the same year - meanwhile on the First Expatriation List of the German Reich of 1933 - via Poland to Paris, where he became a partner of the Carrefour publishing house , in the Lutetia district for himself committed to founding a German Popular Front and cooperated closely with Munzenberg. When Munzenberg was expelled from the KPD in 1938 due to his criticism of the Moscow trials in 1938, Maslowski also left the KPD and until 1940 edited the magazine Zukunft, founded by Munzenberg and Arthur Koestler . After the German occupation of France in 1940, he fled to the south of France, where he hid underground until the liberation.

In 1945 Maslowski returned to Germany, where he joined the SPD , with which he had a conflicted relationship. From 1946 to 1967 he was the editor of the Neue Presse in Coburg , and until 1963 he was also its editor-in-chief. In 1973 he called together u. a. With Karl Retzlaw , Augustin Souchy and Peter Bernhardi, the Karl Liebknecht working group , a left-wing discussion forum, was established and in 1976 was one of the founding members of the International Association of the Non-Denominational .

Works

The theological beast. The so-called devil and his story in Christianity . IBDK-Verlag, Berlin 1978
Papal Church without a halo: History of the Councils from Constance to Vatican II . Alibri Verlag, Aschaffenburg 2006

literature

Maslowski, Peter . 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 .

Web links

Literature by and about Peter Maslowski in the catalog of the German National Library
Peter Maslowski in the database of members of the Reichstag

Individual evidence

↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 3 (reprinted 2010).

personal data
SURNAME	Maslowski, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German politician (USPD, KPD), MdR, journalist and critic of religion
DATE OF BIRTH	April 25, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH	Berlin
DATE OF DEATH	April 24, 1983
Place of death	Sommerhausen

[1] Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 3 (reprinted 2010).