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Writing against Hitler
Hermann Budzislawski and the Making of Twentieth-Century Socialism
Daniel Siemens
Translated by Ben Fowkes
George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas
Steven E. Aschheim, Annette Becker, Skye Doney, and David J. Sorkin, Series Editors
“Siemens is a remarkable researcher who brings important gifts of imagination and archival persistence to his work. These qualities are evident in Writing against Hitler, an original study of one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable Zelig-like figures.”
—Benjamin Hett, author of The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War
Socialist intellectuals and twentieth-century Germany
In Writing against Hitler, Daniel Siemens reconstructs the history of the struggles of socialist intellectuals in Germany from the 1930s through the post–World War II era by focusing on the life of one influential member of that group, Hermann Budzislawski (1901–78). In the 1930s, Budzislawski was a journalist who served as the editor in chief of the prominent antifascist journal Die neue Weltbühne. After the German occupation of France, he worked in exile in the United States until 1948, when he moved to East Germany. He became influential in training a new generation of journalists and worked as a politician.
Through the twin stories of a highly ambitious figure and the legendary publication he headed, Siemens charts the course of the intellectual Left’s rise and decline in power during the decades that shaped the political divides of the twentieth century. Crucially, his account challenges the widely held belief that post-1989 German unification has represented a victory over the traumas of the past. Instead, Siemens shows the complexity of different strains of socialist thought and activity and demonstrates the contested place of Nazi Germany’s exiles at the center of Cold War Germany’s cultural history.
Daniel Siemens is a professor and chair of European history at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts.
Ben Fowkes is the author, editor, or translator of many books on the history of European socialism, including Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (Capital, vol. III).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. Jew, Socialist, Eugenicist: Early Influences
2. First Steps as a Journalist: Navigating Berlin in the Weimar Republic
3. Writing against Hitler: Budzislawski as an Anti-Fascist Journalist in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia
4. Parisian Impasse: The End of Die neue Weltbühne, Internment, and Flight
5. Protected by the Class Enemy: Exile in the United States
6. The War after the War: Leaving the United Sttates and Starting Afresh in the GDR
7. The Invention of Socialist Journalism: Budzislawski as University Professor in Leipzig
8. Belated Satisfaction: Back in Charge of Die Weltbühne
9. In the Ambience of Power: The Final Years
10. What Remains? A Twentieth-Century German Life
Epilogue: “Operation Legacy”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Larger images
January 2025
384 pp. 6 x 9
28 b/w illus.
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