Willy Huhn (theorist)

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Willy Huhn (born January 11, 1909 in Metz , † February 17, 1970 in Berlin ) was a German councilor communist theorist.

Life

Willy Huhn was the son of a German national police officer. In 1919 his family was expelled from Metz and moved to Berlin, where Willy Huhn worked as a commercial clerk. When his father died in 1929, Willy began to be politically active and he joined the left-wing social democratic central association of employees . In 1930 he joined the Young Socialist Association of Greater Berlin and, after its dissolution by decree of the SPD , in 1931 the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany . He was a member of this until the beginning of 1933. At the same time he was a member of the Red Fighters , a council communist clandestine group.

During the National Socialist era , after brief imprisonment in 1933 and 1934, he worked as a commercial clerk until he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. After 1945 he joined the KPD and in 1946 the SED , initially maintaining his council communist views, and worked as a teacher and director of adult education centers in East Berlin and Gera until 1948. After moving to West Berlin in 1948, he worked at the August Bebel Institute and as a lecturer at the German School of Politics. In 1951 he was expelled from the SPD, of which he had become a member again in 1948, because he had criticized the role of the SPD in the November Revolution in magazine articles . When he was expelled from the party, his teaching activities ended, and after a period of unemployment, Huhn started working as a freelance journalist. He wrote mostly in small left-wing socialist periodicals. From 1950 to 1952 he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Pro and contra . From 1954 to 1955 he was a member of the Working Committee of the International of War Resisters (IDK).

In the 1960s, Huhn, together with Michael Mauke, who was twenty years younger, became a key word and mentor of the decidedly Marxist wing of the SDS . Willy Huhn is one of the few people who actively embodied the connection between the new left and the radical part of the old workers' movement of the Weimar Republic (see also Fritz Lamm ). One of Huhn's students was Christian Riechers , who became known as the first (West) German Antonio Gramsci researcher from the late 1960s . Huhn developed several dozen manuscripts for his group of students, which were devoted to various contemporary questions (including Germany and the war guilt question) and aspects of Marxist criticism (including Marx and Engels on the Polish question). These manuscripts circulated as hectographed typescripts. Huhn deliberately based his style and working method on the political writings of Karl Marx ( Herr Vogt , The eighteenth Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte , The Civil War in France ). Excerpts, annotated collections of quotations, free explication of the topic merge into one another with Huhn.

Huhn was a proponent of revolutionary defeatism : he was a relentless critic of German nationalism in all its shades, without referring positively to the Western or Eastern powers.

During the 1968 rebellion , Huhn was admired by the left for his great knowledge, but he was also critical of the movement. The councils project group in the SDS (collaboration with Bernd Rabehl, among others ) was largely inspired by Huhn. In 1970 he died after a long illness.

His estate is in the IISG in Amsterdam . The library maintained by him and his son Paul Huhn is now in the Library for Social Sciences and Eastern European Studies at the Free University of Berlin . Two anthologies with selected texts from Huhn's work were published in 2003 and 2017.

Fonts

  • The statism of social democracy. On the prehistory of Nazi fascism. Text selection with a foreword by Clemens Nachtmann and an attached text by Joachim Bruhn , Ça-Ira-Verlag, Freiburg / Br. 2003, ISBN 3-924627-05-3 .
  • Trotsky, the failed Stalin. Karin Kramer Verlag, West Berlin 1973 (French translation: Trotsky, le Staline manque. Paris, Spartacus, 1981).
  • The holy folly: Bernhard von Clairvaux, the crusades and the "priest regent" Konrad. Heretical reflections on an 800th anniversary celebration and its connection with the European Defense Community. Hubert Freistühler Verlag, Schwerte / Ruhr 1953.
  • Being and appearance. A Marxist Study of the Relationship between Reality and Ideology . Working group for scientific socialism, Munich-Gauting 1949.

literature

  • Christian Riechers : Willy Huhn (1909–1970): A biographical note . In: Willy Huhn: Statism of Social Democracy: To the prehistory of Nazi fascism . Freiburg 2003.
  • Jochen Gester : In search of Rosa's legacy. The German Marxist Willy Huhn (1909–1970) , Die Buchmacherei, Berlin 2017.
  • Jochen Gester : State, capital, capitalism, classes in post-revolutionary Russia. Did the building of a non-capitalist society succeed? A controversy between Milovan Djilas, Ernest Mandel and Willy Huhn. , Die Buchmacherei, Berlin 2018.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Michael Kubina: From Utopia, Resistance and Cold War. The untimely life of the Berlin councilor communist Alfred Weiland (1906–1978) . Münster 2001, p. 209 f.
  2. ^ Christian Riechers : Willy Huhn (1909–1970): A biographical note . In: Willy Huhn: Statism of Social Democracy: To the prehistory of Nazi fascism . Freiburg 2003; Jochen Gester: In search of Rosa's legacy. The German Marxist Willy Huhn (1909–1970) , Die Buchmacherei, Berlin 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Chicken, Willy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German councilor communist theorist
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Metz
DATE OF DEATH 17th February 1970
Place of death West Berlin