Overview

Walter Benjamin derided Werner Scholem as a 'rogue' in 1924. Josef Stalin referred him as a 'splendid man', but soon backtracked and labelled him an 'imbecile', while Ernst Thalmann, chairman of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), warned his followers against the dangers of 'Scholemism'. This first biography of Werner Scholem tells his life story by drawing on a wide range of original sources and archive material long hidden beyond the Iron Curtain of the Cold War era.

Full Product Details

9781608469963

Table of Contents

Reviews

The most interesting parts of Hoffrogge's work are perhaps the thick descriptions of the Weimar Republic's communist milieu with its peculiar mixture of dogmatism and careerism, male chauvinism and women's emancipation, puritanism and sexual permissiveness. The interesting figure here is Scholem's wife Emmy, who came from humble background, eager to learn and climb the social ladder, aware of her chances for emancipation and equipped with all the weapons of a woman. - Gerd Koenen, DIE ZEIT .. . in the field of historical research, it is the more refined work by Ralf Hoffrogge that will make a lasting impression. His reconstruction of events is the only one that allows us to understand Scholem's arrest and trial ... - Lorenz Jaeger, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 4th 2014 .. . Two recently published biographies that could not be more different are devoted to the life of this exceptional politician, to whom the historian Miriam Zadoff attributed an agile temperament, but also depicted him in an apotheosis of suffering, comparing Scholem to the biblical Job. Quite different is the sober reconstruction of the historian Ralf Hoffrogge, invariably oriented towards the facts. Almost entirely without gaps, this political biography reconstructs the twisted lifeline of Scholem in the context of its time. The merit of both biographies consists not least in the fact that here for the first time a personality is portrayed who embodied in his intellectual and political action the intrinsic ambiguity of the period between the two world wars. - Wolf Scheller in J�dische Allgemeine Zeitung

Author Information

Ralf Hoffrogge, Dr. phil. (2013), University of Potsdam, is Postdoctoral Researcher at Ruhr-Universitt Bochum (Germany) and has published widely on German labour history. His latest publication isWorking-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Mller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement(Haymarket Books, 2015).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available