Werner Scholem

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Werner Scholem (around 1924)

Werner Scholem (born December 29, 1895 in Berlin ; died July 17, 1940 in Buchenwald concentration camp ) was a German politician of the KPD , a member of the Reichstag and a victim of National Socialism .

Live and act

Youth and politicization

Scholem was the son of a Berlin print shop owner. One of his brothers was the religious historian Gerhard Scholem, who became known under the name Gershom Scholem . Scholem had sympathized with Zionism since his youth . Because of his early political engagement, there were violent family conflicts, which is why he had to go to school at the Gildemeister Institute in Hanover in 1913 , where Ernst Jünger was his classmate. In 1912 he joined the Socialist Workers' Youth . He has also been a journalist since early youth.

As a reluctant soldier in the First World War

From 1915 to 1918 he did military service in the First World War . In 1917 he joined the USPD and was temporarily imprisoned in the Halle penal institution , also known as the Red Ox , and in the Berlin-Spandau military prison on charges of libel and anti-war activities . After his release, he was drafted again in 1918 and served on the Western Front , where he was almost killed in an offensive in Champagne.

From the USPD to the KPD

After the World War, Scholem returned to his fiancée Emmy Wiechelt in Hanover and was temporarily mayor in Linden near Hanover. From 1919 Scholem earned his living in Halle (Saale) as editor of the Volksblatt , a local organ of the USPD.

With the split of the USPD in 1920 he switched to the KPD, where he belonged to the left wing from around 1921. In the same year they sent him to the Prussian state parliament as a representative . In the same year Scholem became editor of the party newspaper Die Rote Fahne . According to the imprint, the now 25-year-old was even editor-in-chief there. However, the historian Ralf Hoffrogge has shown that the KPD needed the young Scholem above all in his function as a member of parliament at this point. Its parliamentary immunity was intended to protect the newspaper from prosecution. However, Scholem fared like many a "seat editor" of social democratic newspapers of the empire: he had to spend three months in prison after a case of high treason and treason came against him as a result of the "March Action" of 1921. For a short time, Scholem tried to escape by fleeing abroad, was even wanted on a wanted record, but was arrested in September 1922 and only released on bail in December.

Organizer of the "Bolshevization" of the KPD

During the following years, Scholem worked as head of organization of the KPD mostly in Berlin. In 1924 he was promoted to head of the Reich organization and thus a member of the Politburo of the KPD. From 1924 to 1928 he was a member of the German Reichstag. He was close to the so-called Fischer - Maslow group associated with Comintern chairman Zinoviev , which formed the new “ultra-left” party leadership of the KPD after the “right” wing of the party around Heinrich Brandler was removed from the party leadership in 1923. At this time, Scholem was the second most important leading figure in the KPD after Ruth Fischer , since Arkadij Maslow, as the leading head of the ultra-left, was in prison until 1926. During his tenure as head of the organization, it was Scholem's task to rebuild the KPD structures that had fallen into disrepair until the beginning of 1924 after a party ban. He had some successes here, for example in increasing the number of members and restructuring the party finances. At the same time, however, Scholem used his position to remove supporters of the old Brandler leadership from their posts and to fill them with supporters of the left leadership. He also tightened the party structures in favor of a more centralized leadership - a model that was praised in the party press as “Bolshevization”, as an alignment with the “Leninist” structures of the Russian CP.

In the end, Scholem himself fell victim to this authoritarian centralization. After losses in the Reich presidential elections in 1925 , he and the new left party leadership were deposed in August 1925. The establishment of a new left opposition, as it was still possible without any problems in 1921, was no longer successful in the “Bolshevik” party - every “factional work” was bitterly pursued by the new leadership around Ernst Thalmann . Due to the co-organization of the declaration of 700 against the suppression of the United Left Opposition in the Soviet Union , Scholem was expelled from the KPD in November 1926.

From 1926 until death in Buchenwald concentration camp (1940)

Stolperstein , Klopstockstrasse 18, in Berlin's Hansaviertel

Scholem joined the group of Left Communists in the Reichstag and in April 1928 was one of the founders of the Lenin League , which grew into a major opposition communist organization in Germany. Scholem himself left this in the same year and remained non-party, but continued to sympathize with Trotskyist positions and the Left Opposition (LO) . On the other hand, he rejected Stalinism . He is said to have often written articles for the LO newspaper Permanent Revolution , which, however, did not appear under his real name.

As a Jew and Communist , Scholem was arrested after the so-called seizure of power by the National Socialists on February 28 and again on April 23, 1933 and taken into " protective custody ". From June 1933 he was on remand in Moabit Prison . On March 9, 1935, the People's Court acquitted him of the charge of high treason for lack of evidence . The subject of the proceedings was a conversation between Scholem and a Reichswehr soldier in the spring of 1932 - Scholem was accused of “ decomposing the Reichswehr ”. After the acquittal, he came again into "protective custody" and was from February 1937 at the Dachau concentration camp and from September 1938 at the Buchenwald concentration camp held. He was shot dead in Buchenwald on July 17, 1940, allegedly “on the run”.

In a letter to Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem reports on the family's efforts to obtain Werner Scholem's release. These failed because Scholem was on a list of prisoners who could only be released with the permission of Joseph Goebbels : “ Goebbels needs a few Jews there, with whom he can show that he has trampled under Bolshevism , and in addition is apparently u. a. my brother chosen. ”A bust of Scholem, presumably made in Dachau, was shown in 1937 in the propaganda exhibition The Eternal Jew in Munich. As a communist excluded from the party and a non-religious Jew, Scholem remained isolated in the concentration camps, according to his daughter, although he campaigned for numerous fellow prisoners.

Private life

Werner Scholem married his childhood sweetheart Emmy Wiechelt in 1917 , whom he had met in the socialist youth workers. The two were politically active together and married until Scholem's death. Emmy, who was arrested together with Werner in 1933, managed to escape to London with their two daughters Edith and Renate in 1934 after a leave of imprisonment. Renate Scholem, born in 1923, gained great fame as an actress in the 1950s under the name Renee Goddard .

Memories of Werner Scholem

Memorial plaques in front of the Reichstag

Since 1992 one of the ninety-six memorial plaques for members of the Reichstag murdered by the National Socialists has been commemorating Scholem near the Reichstag building in Berlin .

In front of his former apartment on Klopstockstrasse in Berlin's Hansaviertel , a stumbling block has been reminding of Werner Scholem since 2007 . Scholem lived at Klopstockstraße 7, the property is now number 18.

Werner Scholem as a literary figure

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Scholem, who hardly played a role in public memory in the decades after his death, became the subject of various novels and stories by Arkadij Maslow , Franz Jung , Alexander Kluge and Hans Magnus Enzensberger from the 1990s - a popularity that hardly anyone can any other member of the Reichstag ever achieved. The literary processing all revolves around Scholem's arrest in 1933 and his last trial for "decomposing the Reichswehr". Based on the manuscript “The General's Daughter”, which Arkadij Maslow wrote in 1935 while in exile in Paris, but was not published until 2011, Scholem is portrayed sometimes tragically, sometimes more comedically as a Soviet spy “in the service of the world revolution”. He is said to have seduced Marie Luise von Hammerstein , daughter of the Chief of Army Command, Colonel General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord , in order to elicit her father's official secrets.

In his historical reconstruction based on the trial documents of the People's Court from 1933 to 1935 as well as other sources, Scholem's biographer Ralf Hoffrogge considers an affair between Scholem and Marie Luise von Hammerstein to be proven, but also proves that Scholem did not work for the secret service of the KPD or the Soviet Union .

Films about Scholem's biography

The life of Werner Scholem was the subject of two short documentaries, both of which were made with the participation of his daughter Renee Goddard. It started with an interview by Alexander Kluge with Goddard in the “News and Stories” series in 2008 under the title “Some dead are not dead - Renee Goddard about her father, the legendary socialist Werner Scholem”. In 2014, Niels Bolbrinker made a documentary entitled Between Utopia and Counterrevolution , which is illustrated with photos from Scholem's estate.

Literature (alphabetical)

Monographs

Essays

  • Michael Buckmiller , Pascal Nafe: The near expectation of communism - Werner Scholem. In: Judaism and Political Existence. Hannover 2000, pp. 61-82.
  • Ralf Hoffrogge: utopias on the edge. The correspondence between Werner Scholem and Gershom Scholem in the years 1914–1919. In: Writing in War - Writing from War. Field post in the age of world wars. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8375-0461-3 , pp. 429-440.
  • Ralf Hoffrogge: Emmy and Werner Scholem in the struggle between utopia and counter-revolution. In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter. New episode Volume 65 (2011), pp. 157–176.
  • Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).
  • Mirjam Zadoff: Family Revolution in 1933. The German-Jewish Communists Werner and Emmy Scholem in correspondence. In: Sylvia Asmus, Germaine Goetzinger, Hiltrud Häntzschel , Inge Hansen-Schaberg (eds.): On unsafe terrain. Letter writing in exile. edition text + kritik, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-86916-272-0 , pp. 175–187.
  • Mirjam Zadoff: “… the living proof of their atrocities.” Arthur Rosenberg to Emmy Scholem on November 18, 1938. In: Munich Contributions to Jewish History and Culture. 7 (2013) 2, ISSN  1864-385X , pp. 33-41.
  • Mirjam Zadoff: Among brothers - Gershom and Werner Scholem. From the utopias of youth to everyday Jewish life between the wars. In: Munich Contributions to Jewish History and Culture. Volume 1, Issue 2, 2007, ISSN  1864-385X , pp. 56-66.

Journalistic articles

Web links

Commons : Werner Scholem  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ralf Hoffrogge: Werner Scholem - a political biography (1895-1940). UVK Verlag, Konstanz 2014, pp. 15–41.
  2. ^ Ralf Hoffrogge: Werner Scholem - a political biography (1895-1940). UVK Verlag, Konstanz 2014, pp. 116–135.
  3. ^ Ralf Hoffrogge: Werner Scholem - a political biography (1895-1940). UVK Verlag, Konstanz 2014, pp. 166–139, illustration of the profile p. 178.
  4. ↑ On the “Bolshevikization” cf. Ralf Hoffrogge: Werner Scholem - a political biography (1895-1940). UVK Verlag, Konstanz 2014, pp. 267–284.
  5. ↑ Martin Schumacher (Ed.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation 1933–1945. Droste-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1991, ISBN 3-7700-5162-9 , p. 506ff.
  6. ↑ letter Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin dated 19 April 1936 quoted by Schumacher, MdR S. 509. According to the biography of Hoffrogge existed a list of system opponents on the also Scholem's name was, but it was only in 1939 for Heinrich Himmler created . Nevertheless, Scholem was mentioned by Goebbels in his diary as early as 1924, so Gershom Scholem's conjecture seems plausible. Cf. Hoffrogge: Werner Scholem - a political biography. P. 429ff.
  7. ^ Information from the daughter dated November 27, 1989, see Schumacher, MdR p. 509.
  8. ↑ See Buckmiller / Nafe 2000.
  9. ↑ See Hans Magnus Enzensberger: A posthumous conversation with Werner Scholem. In: ders., Hammerstein or Der Eigensinn, Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 137–145. Alexander Kluge: Lebendigkeit von 1931. In: ders., The gap that the devil leaves. Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 25-30. Franz Jung: Re. The Hammersteins. In: Franz Jung work edition. Volume 9/2, Hamburg 1997.
  10. ↑ Arkadij Maslow: The general's daughter. Berlin 2011. Scholem appears here under the pseudonym Gerhard Alkan.
  11. ^ Hoffrogge: Werner Scholem - a political biography. Konstanz 2014, pp. 395-409.
  12. ↑ Between utopia and counter-revolution - a short film about the lives of Emmi and Werner Scholem
personal data
SURNAME Scholem, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 17th July 1940
Place of death Buchenwald concentration camp