Felix Weil financed left-wing causes without ever joining the Communist Party

Evidence

Perhaps because of a bad conscience over his son’s loveless childhood and youth, the father did not insist on his taking up a career in business or any other financial profession. Felix Weil became neither a genuine businessman nor a genuine scholar nor a genuine artist, but instead a patron of the left (after his mother’s death in 1913 he had already inherited a million gold pesos ) and a part-time scholar. He was one of those young people who had been politicized by the war and the November Revolution, who were convinced of the practicality and superiority of socialism as a more advanced form of economic organization, and who devoted themselves to the study of socialist theories so that they could take up leading positions in the workers’ movement or in a new socialist order as soon as possible. But he kept himself at a certain distance while devoting himself to this goal. As a `salon Bolshevik’ (as he described himself in 1973 in a lecture on the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute of Social Research), Weil worked in the 1920s on the periphery of the right wing of the German Communist Party (KPD). He never became a member, although he was a close friend of Clara Zetkin and Paul Frölich, and had married the daughter of an older socialist who was a good friend of Zetkin. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 43

Categorization

• DEFINE: Weil’s own coinage ‘salon Bolshevik’ is a useful period term for the moneyed fellow-traveller who funds but withholds membership.
• XREF: connects to: Felix Weil’s socialist activism got him expelled from Tübingen and banned from Württemberg — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 33; The KPD mocked Felix Weil for never joining the Party — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 884; Felix Weil chose Grünberg over politically tainted communist candidates for the Frankfurt directorship. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 40

Broader Connections

• The KPD mocked Felix Weil for never joining the Party #complicates (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 884