The Institute admitted party activists only for their scholarly work

Evidence

When the Institut did accept members who were politically committed, it was solely because of their nonpolitical work. The most important of the activists in its ranks was Karl August Wittfogel. The son of a Lutheran schoolteacher, Wittfogel was born in the small Hanoverian town of Woltersdorf in 1896. Active in the German youth movement before the war, he became increasingly involved in radical politics by its end. In November, 1918, he joined the Independent Socialist party and two years later, its Communist successor. Throughout the Weimar period he directed much of his considerable energy into party work, although he was frequently in hot water in Moscow for the heterodoxy of his positions. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 120

Categorization

• SEED: Wittfogel’s later Asiatic Mode of Production theory and his anti-communist turn after 1950 could anchor an essay on the trajectory of Western Marxists from party loyalty to Cold War critique.