A Frankfurt School member risked his life resigning from the Communist Party
Evidence
Paul Massing, for example, who wrote his doctoral thesis in Frankfurt on Agrarian Conditions in France in the Nineteenth Century and the Agrarian Programme of the French Socialist Parties, became the Berlin correspondent of the Moscow International Agrarian Institute in 1928, and in 1929 a research assistant of the Institute in Moscow itself. In 1931 he returned to Berlin to fight fascism. After being interned in the concentration camp at Oranienburg, he escaped to France and travelled between the USA and Europe. Even after all this, he undertook a trip to Moscow in 1937-8, endangering his life, to announce that he was leaving the Communist Party. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 113
Categorization
- SHARE: The detail that Massing traveled to Moscow in 1937-38 — the height of the purges — specifically to announce his Party resignation, at mortal risk, is a vivid exchange-worthy anecdote for a Soviet history person.
- SEED: The figure of an intellectual who travels into the heart of the terror to formally resign his Party membership is a striking story-ethical angle: loyalty as an obligation even when renouncing.
- XREF: connects to: A Communist ex-member risked his life to formally break with the Party — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 527
Broader Connections
- A Communist ex-member risked his life to formally break with the Party
#corroborates(0.92) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 527