Writing Against Hitler
Hermann Budzislawski and the Making of Twentieth-Century Socialism

Daniel Siemens (Author), Ben Fowkes (Translated by)

9780299351304

Hardback, published 21 January 2025

384 pages, 28 b&w illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.6 cm, 0.454 kg

“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

In Writing Against Hitler, Daniel Siemens reconstructs the history of the struggles of socialist intellectuals in Germany from the 1920s 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 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 mid-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 reveals the contested place of Nazi Germany’s exiles at the center of Cold War Germany’s cultural history.

• 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 Weltbü
  hne, 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 Weltbü
  hne
• 9. In the Ambience of Power: The Final Years
• 10. What Remains? A Twentieth-Century German Life
• Epilogue: "
  Operation Legacy"
  
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index