Rolf Vellay

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Rolf Vellay (* 1927 ; † December 22, 2001 ) was a German communist activist and journalist.

Life

Rolf Vellay was the son of a Silesian officer and large landowning family . In 1944, at the age of 17, he became a soldier. After the end of the war he worked as a farmhand in Bavaria and then attended the trade school in Straubing . He came to journalism as a volunteer. It was there that he first came into contact with the theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . Vellay broke off a degree that he had begun in 1950 (among others with Wolfgang Abendroth ) to work as a miner because he believed that as a communist he had to belong to the proletariat . Based on this conviction, he also joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and remained a member even after it was banned in 1956. He was arrested several times for his work for the now illegal KPD and spent a total of one year in prison. Since Vellay did not join the German Communist Party (DKP), the successor party of the KPD, in 1968 , he lost influence, but had the opportunity to work in a non-partisan way within the small communist parties of the Federal Republic. Vellay corresponded with numerous communist-oriented personalities, u. a. Peter Hacks , Hanfried Müller , Hans Heinz Holz , Georg Fülberth and Kurt Gossweiler . In 1992 he succeeded in hiring representatives of the DKP, the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD), the Workers' Union for the Reconstruction of the KPD , the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the Communist Party of Germany / Marxist-Leninists (KPD / ML) to move to a joint discussion, which was led by Hans Heinz Holz.

In 1985 he joined a workers brigade that supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua . To support political friends, he traveled to Chile in 2000 and 2001 , where he also visited Margot Honecker . Vellay lived in dates .

Vellay was an employee of the "Kommunistische Arbeiterzeitung" (KAZ) and wrote regularly for the magazines Weißenseer Blätter and " Offen-siv ".

Political positions

Vellay represented an "anti-revisionist" position from the end of the 1980s and rejected the condemnation of Stalin and the abandonment of his policy since the XX. Party congress of the CPSU . He saw in Stalin one of the most important figures in the history of the struggle of the proletariat. As an indication of the size and importance of Stalin, he stated that his death in France , an imperialist country in Vellay's opinion , had been ordered to be mourned by the state . He assessed the role of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev as particularly critical . Was Vellay the opinion that only a revolution to socialism and communism could bring, so he refused coups. Another important point in Vellay's political orientation was anti-fascism , so it outraged him when individual peoples were labeled as criminal in general terms and he made it important to name Polish cities by their Polish name.

Quotes

  • Imperialism modernizes production, then we take it away from it.

Publications

  • With the "anachronistic train" from Kiel to Bonn , 1980, Munich: Verlag Freies Volk.
  • The other Gorbachev book, the current reader: ´More socialism´ with Gorbachev? Four years of ´perestroika´, ´glasnost´ and ´new thinking´ - what did it bring? A Marxist-Leninist analysis (not only) for communists. , 1989, self-published.
  • Forward in the international revolutionary movement means today: Back to Stalin! (Contribution to the discussion for the event organized by the Marx-Engels Foundation on the occasion of Friedrich Engels '170th birthday), in: Supplement to the Communist Workers' Newspaper No. 219 of June 18, 1991
  • Was the GDR socialist? , 1992, self-published.
  • The socialist character of the GDR , in Risen from the ruins: on the revolutionary legacy of the GDR; 20./21. November 1999: 50 years of the GDR - for socialism and peace , 2000, Hanover: F. Flegel. ISBN 3-00-005444-8 .
  • Rolf Vellay, Selected essays, letters and lectures , 2002, Berlin: Series of publications of the KPD.
  • Selected essays, letters and lectures , 2005, Berlin: Ernst-Thälmann-Verlag.
  • "... Without knowledge of the SED leadership ..."! and What lessons can we learn from the Chilean catastrophe? , in loss analysis , 2007, Hannover: Offensiv-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-00-021905-4 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e f Kurt Gossweiler: Farewell to Rolf Vellay
  2. ↑ Der Spiegel July 7, 1954 Digitized
  3. ↑ Obituary by the editorial staff of the Communist Workers' Newspaper on Vellay  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 40 kB)@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.kaz-online.de  
  4. ↑ Nick Brauns: Back to Stalin?
  5. ↑ Kurt Gossweiler: Why use "Die Onion Gorbatschow"?
  6. ^ Rolf Vellay: Objection
  7. ↑ Rolf Vellay: Völkerhetze in the FAZ  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 295 kB)@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.kaz-online.de  
  8. ^ Dietmar Dath: Nationalization , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. May 5, 2009.  Retrieved December 23, 2009
personal data
SURNAME Vellay, Rolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist
DATE OF BIRTH 1927
DATE OF DEATH December 22, 2001