Walter Haenisch

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Walter Haenisch (born December 11, 1906 in Dortmund , † June 16, 1938 in Butowo ( USSR )) was a German Anglist, literary scholar, Marx researcher, collaborator on the first Marx-Engels Complete Edition 1932-1935, emigrant in the Soviet Union, and Victim of stalinism. Haenisch was executed on June 16, 1938 and posthumously rehabilitated on July 28, 1956.

Life

Youth in Berlin as the son of an SPD politician (1906 to 1925)

Walter Haenisch was born in Dortmund in 1906 as the son of the then editor-in-chief of the Dortmund social democratic workers' newspaper Konrad Haenisch and Wilhelmine, née. Bölling, born. His father had been a representative of the left wing of the SPD until 1914 and had broken with his bourgeois-conservative family himself as a high school student. Haenisch attended secondary school until 1922 and a reform school in Letzlingen , the Free School and Work Community, until 1925 , under the direction of Bernhard Uffrecht . In his parents' house in Berlin before 1914 he came into contact with leading members of the left wing of the SPD such as Rosa Luxemburg , Karl Liebknecht , Franz Mehring , and Karl Kautsky . 1914 made Father Konrad with party colleagues from the anti-revisionist Langer Heinrich Cunow , Paul Lensch , and the Russian revolutionary Alexander Parvus , who was a friend and mentor had been the father, called Lensches-Cunow-Haenisch group that the support of the majority SPD for the war credits and a military victory of Germany over the old imperial powers Russia, England and France interpreted in the Marxist sense as the initial spark for the proletarian revolution in Europe. As a result, Konrad Haenisch finally broke with the left of the party. During the war, young Walter met leading representatives of the “right” SPD wing such as Friedrich Ebert , Philipp Scheidemann and Otto Wels at home. The father made a career in the young Weimar Republic, he became the Prussian minister of education (1919–1921) and later district president of Wiesbaden (1922–25), and during this time he particularly campaigned for reconciliation with France. In view of the incipient threat to the republic from right and left, the father was one of the founders of the Reich Banner towards the end of his life .

During this time, Haenisch became a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ), the official youth organization of the SPD, but was excluded in 1924 because of "oppositional activities".

Studies, entry into the KPD (1925–1932)

After the sudden death of his father in 1925, who left five children who were still in training, Haenisch passed his Abitur at the legendary Karl Marx School in Neukölln, which was built up and directed from 1921 by Fritz Karsen (until 1929 Kaiser- Friedrich-Realgymnasium, today Ernst-Abbe-Oberschule (and again Gymnasium)), the first German comprehensive school, and studied German and English in Berlin , Göttingen , Frankfurt and Reading (England) and in France. In 1931 he had to quit his studies for financial reasons. In England in particular, Haenisch occupied himself intensively with the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and, like Marx himself, studied some of their sources in the British Library .

During this time, Haenisch gradually approached the communist movement. In 1927 he joined the Red Aid as a student in Göttingen and the anti-imperialist league . He did not become a KPD member until January 1931, and was active as the head of the street cell in Steglitz until he left for Moscow in early 1932 , as well as working as a freelance worker and editor of various communist newspapers.

Moscow (1932–1938)

At the beginning of 1932 he went to Moscow with his wife Gabriele , also a staunch communist, where both worked at the Marx-Engels Institute . Haenisch had already carried out intensive studies of the work of Karl Marx and Engels in England and Berlin , and in Moscow he worked a. a. a popular edition of the capital , a chronicle about Marx and a MEGA volume about the First International . Haenisch was criticized by the institute's party organization because of non-line-compliant views of the First International and officially dismissed on April 15, 1935 for “operating restrictions”. From September to December 1935, Haenisch worked in the editorial department of the German-language newspaper “Das Neue Dorf” in Charkow . In addition, he wrote several articles for the German-language Moscow journal Internationale Literatur , especially in volumes 6 and 7, as well as an article for the then newly founded Marxist journal " Science and Society " published in New York City in the context of the New School for Social Research in English. A font in French appeared in Paris.

For a short time Haenisch considered volunteering for the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War like his friend Erich Weinert , but rejected this idea out of consideration for his family.

In 1936/37 Haenisch had attracted attention with two essays on Marx and Heine in “International Literature”. In 1937 this resulted in a film project about Heinrich Heine with the screenwriter and theater director Heinz Goldberg , who had traveled to Moscow from Vienna especially for this project.

In the circle of friends of the Haenischs, more and more people were denounced and arrested during this time, it was the beginning of the Great Purge . In early 1938, Haenisch began working as an editor at the German-language Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung (DZZ) , the German-language central organ of the Comintern , before he was arrested on March 11, 1938 himself in his apartment.

An essay on the British poet Percy Shelley , which appeared in Das Wort shortly before his arrest , received great international attention among émigré circles and was also discussed by Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin at their famous meeting in Svendborg ( Denmark ) in June 1938.

Just at the time when Brecht and Benjamin were discussing Haenisch's Shelley article in Denmark, Haenisch was killed on May 17th by an NKVD court in the course of the German operation of the NKVD for "espionage" ( Art. 58 StGB of the RSFSR ) sentenced. On June 16, 1938, he was executed at the Butowo firing range and buried in a mass grave.

One son, Alexander Haenisch (born 1932 in Moscow), died in 1942 of meningitis in Fergana , Uzbek SSR , where he was forcibly relocated with his mother and numerous German emigrants after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Publications

United States

  • Karl Marx and the Democratic Association of 1847 , Science and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter, 1937, pp. 83-102 JSTOR 40399132

France

  • La vie et les luttes de Philippe Buonarroti , Au Bureau d'éditions, 1938 - 112 pages (Trad. De l'allemand par O. Blanc)

Soviet Union (in German)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gabriele Stammberger , Michael Peschke : Well arrived - Moscow. The exile of Gabriele Stammberger 1932–1954 . Basisdruck Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-86163-082-6 , there in particular pp. 101-110 - Walter Haenisch's curriculum vitae for the KPD-WKP transfer commission
  2. ↑ Percy Bysshe Shelley. Das Wort Heft 1 [Issue 1] (January 1938): 96–110.
  3. ^ Robert Kaufman: Intervention & Commitment Forever! Shelley in 1819, Shelley in Brecht, Shelley in Adorno, Shelley in Benjamin: In: Reading Shelley's Interventionist Poetry 1819–1820: (Michael Scrivener, ed.): "Romantic Circles", University of Maryland, USA (mentions Haenisch's Shelley essay in Paragraphs 6 to 12)
  4. ↑ Andrew Benjamin: Walter Benjamin and Art: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005, ISBN 9780826467294 (on Haenisch's Shelley essay, pp. 134-135)
  5. ↑ Alexander Vatlin : "What a devil's pack": The German operation of the NKVD in Moscow and in the Moscow region from 1936 to 1941. Metropol, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86331-090-5 , p. 306
  6. ↑ Blog :: The 6 Germans from Butovo Memoreal37, June 16, 2013
  7. ↑ Ulla Plener ; Natalia Mussienko: Sentenced to the maximum penalty: death by shooting. Fatalities from Germany and German nationality in the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in 1937/1938. Retrieved August 26, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Haenisch, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German communist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Dortmund
DATE OF DEATH June 16, 1938
Place of death Butowo