Abendroth was the only openly socialist professor in postwar West Germany

Evidence

Abendroth’s roots lay in the labour movement. He had at one time studied with Hugo Sinzheimer in Frankfurt, and had been gaoled by the Nazis for resistance activities before being sent to Punishment Battalion 999, from which he defected to the Greek partisans. In the post-war period, he became perhaps the only openly and staunchly socialist professor at any university in the Federal Republic. Abendroth agreed at once to supervise a Habilitation thesis for Habermas, who had attracted his notice in 1953 with his unusual political critique of Heidegger. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2360

Categorization

• QUESTION: Track Abendroth’s career as a node connecting labor movement Marxism, resistance to Nazism, and early Federal Republic academic socialism.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2360