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Karl August Wittfogel (6 September 1896, in Woltersdorf, Germany25 May 1988, in New York, USA) was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. Originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, after the Second World War Wittfogel was an equally fierce Anticommunist. ==Biography== Karl August Wittfogel was born 6 September 1896 at Woltersdorf, in Lüchow, Province of Hanover. Wittfogel left school in 1914. He studied philosophy, history, sociology, geography at Leipzig University and also in Munich, Berlin and Rostock and in 1919 again in Berlin. From 1921 he studied sinology in Leipzig. In between Wittfogel was drafted into a Signal Corps Unit (''Fernmeldeeinheit'') in 1917〔See the useful Wittfogel page of his high school, the Johanneum, Lüneburg and esp. Ulrich Menzel's excellent online presentation in the ''Personenlexikon Internationale Beziehungen virtuell''.〕 Before the First World War, he was the leader of the Lüneburg Wandervogel group.〔Lit.: Walter Laqueur, ''Young Germany'', 1962.〕 In 1918, he set up the Lüneburg local〔Lit.: Mathias Greffrath, ''Ein ernster Mensch'', Die Zeit, 10. 6. 1988 (online archives). Later Wittfogel wrote under the pseudonym "Jungmann" am account of youth movements in Max Horkheimer's compilation "Studies in Authority and the Family." Unfortunately, although Horkheimer's and Herbert Marcuse's contributions have been translated, Wittfogel's have not been. :Wittfogel who had been a leader of the German Socialist Student Movement after the war beside Klaus Reichenbach liked Rudi Dutschke when they met in Düsseldorf in 1979.〕 of the radical Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). In 1920, he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).〔At the ''Meißnertag'' 1923, a large Youth Movement gathering, Wittfogel asked the members of the ''Freideutsche Jugend'': "''In Wahrheit steht jedes Zeitalter unter einer großen Idee. Habt ihr diese große Idee. Seid ihr bereit dafür zu sterben?''" Wittfogel asked them if they knew the need of the age, its big idea and if they had what it takes to die for their convictions. :Lit.: Karl-Otto Schüddekopf, ''Linke Leute von rechts'', Stuttgart, 1960. :After expelling a strong radical group in the autumn of 1919, the KPD was basically a sect, until a majority of USPD delegates decided to join it at their party convention in October 1920. A third of USPD members (ca. 300,000) joined the 70,000-strong KPD. :Lit.: Ossip K. Flechtheim, ''Die KPD in der Weimarer Republik'' (1st edition 1948), Frankfurt, 1969 edition, pp. 35f., 156f.〕 Wittfogel met Karl Korsch in 1920〔M. Buckmiller says not only because W. taught at the Volkshochschule Schloss Tinz, but also because of Korsch's wife Dr. Hedda Korsch, who was active in the school reform movement.〕 and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the Institute for Social Research〔Felix Weil financed and Richard Sorge organized this ''Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche'' (1st marxist workweek) with Karl Korsch and Hedda Korsch, Georgy Lukacs, Béla Fogarasi, his later wife Margarete Lissauer, Felix José and Käthe Weil (they were married 1921-1929), Richard and Christiane Sorge, Friedrich Pollock, Julian Gumperz and his later wife Hede Massing, from 1919 to 1923 married to Gerhart Eisler, Konstantin Zetkin, Fukomoto, Eduard Ludwig Alexander and Gertrud Alexander, their kid, and others. Rose Wittfogel, born Schlesinger, also took part. They were married from 1921 (other sources say 1920) to 1929. She was a sculptor, later a librarian at the Frankfurt Institute. She emigrated to the Soviet Union and worked there (among other things?) as a translator at the VAGAAR, an Organisation for foreign workers. :Michael Buckmiller, ''Die "Marxistische Arbeitswoche" 1923 und die Gründung des "Instituts für Sozialforschung"'',in Willem van Reijen, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (eds.), ''Grand Hotel Abgrund'', p. 141-182. For Rose Schlesinger p. 148, citing D. Pike, ''Deutsche Schriftsteller im sowjetischen Exil, 1934-1945'', Frankfurt am Main, 1981, S. 311.〕 and from 1925 to 1933 was a member of the Institute.〔If he seems not to really belong to the famous Frankfurt School, it may be because of his Marxism, his activism or even because he was not Jewish.〕 He received his Ph.D. from the Frankfurter Universität in 1928.〔His supervisors were Wilhelm Gerloff, Richard Wilhelm and Franz Oppenheimer. His thesis was ''On the Economical Importance of the Agrarian and Industrial Productive Forces in China'', :''Die ökonomische Bedeutung der agrikolen und industriellen Produktivkräfte Chinas'', W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart. 1930. :This was the first chapter of ''Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas'', 1931.〕 Wittfogel was always an active and faithful member of the communist party and a vocal critic of all its enemies.〔In his ''Mass Psychology of Fascism'', Wilhelm Reich mentions a bizarre debate with Otto Strasser on religion, in a Berlin mass meeting, in January, 1933. :In a short 1974 notice to a reprint of his 1929 essay on Political Geography, Wittfogel says he came out much stronger against the Nazis than the KPD and Komintern line wanted. :Lit.: ''Politische Geography'', Josef Matznetter, ed., Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1977, p. 230. :Communist students at Jena invited him and Alfred Bäumler for a debate on the importance of Hegel for the Germany of today. Bäumler was a specialist on Kant, Nietzsche and Bachofen. He soon became a leading Nazi philosopher.〕 When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wittfogel tried to escape to Switzerland, but was arrested and interned in prisons and concentration camps.〔Borgermoor Moorlager Esterwegen im Emsland, a peat bog-camp in the Emsland and in Lichtenburg near Torgau. :Lit.: A novel ''Staatliches Konzentrationslager VII, Eine "Erziehungsanstalt" im Dritten Reich'' was first published in London, 1936 under the pen name ''Klaus Hinrichs''. German edition: Edition Temmen, Bremen, 1991.〕 An international outcry〔His second wife Olga Joffe worked tirelessly for his release and, with the help of nationalbolshevist revolutionary Friedrich Hielscher and the also radical right-wing geographer Karl Haushofer and the LSE historian R. H. Tawney, managed to get Wittfogel free (Mathias Greffrath, Martin Jay).〕 led to his freedom in 1934. He left Germany for England and then the United States. Wittfogel's belief in the Soviet Union was destroyed with the Hitler-Stalin alliance, and he began to hate the totalitarian, "asiatic" nature of Russian and Chinese Communism from Lenin to Mao. He turned against his former comrades and denounced some of them, as well as American scholars such as Owen Lattimore and Moses I. Finley, at the McCarran Committee hearings in 1951. He came to believe that the state-owned economies of the Soviet bloc inevitably led to despotic governments even more oppressive than those of "traditional Asia" and that those regimes were the greatest threat to the future of all mankind. In 1921 Wittfogel married Rose Schlesinger. Wittfogel's second wife was the sociologist Olga (Joffe) Lang, a Russian sociologist who traveled with him to China and collaborated with him on a project to analyze the Chinese family. Lang later published a monograph on the Chinese family and a biography of the anarchist writer, Ba Jin.〔(Register of Karl Wittfogel Papers Hoover Institution )〕 Anthropologist Esther Schiff Goldfrank became Wittfogel's wife in 1940.〔Gloria Levitas, ''Esther Schiff Goldfrank'', p. 120- 126, in ''Women Anthropologists'', Ute Gacs, editor, new ed., University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1989.〕 Wittfogel held academic positions at Columbia University from 1939 and was professor for Chinese history at the University of Washington from 1947 to 1966. He died on May 25, 1988. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Karl August Wittfogel」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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