Jürgen Kuczynski

Jürgen Kuczynski (; 17 September 1904 – 6 August 1997) was a German economist, journalist, and communist activist. He also provided intelligence to the Soviet Union during World War II.

By 1936, Kuczynski had followed his father and other family into exile in England. After being temporarily interned as an enemy alien at the start of World War II, during the war he was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, to recruit German communists to be sent to Germany to make contact with resistance groups.

Jürgen's sister Ursula, also known as Ruth Werner, became a spy who worked for the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s.

The family lived in a small villa in the Schlachtensee quarter in the south-west of Berlin. Growing up in a family of left-wing academics, as an adolescent Jürgen Kuczynski met numerous scholars and activists, including communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Kuczynski was deeply influenced by the values, an untranslatable German term for the values of the German upper middle class that emphasized cultivating a cultured, humanist outlook on life together with a love of nature and aestheticism.

Education Between 1910 and 1916 Kuczynski attended a private school in Berlin-Zehlendorf, before progressing to an academic secondary school in the city. He completed his schooling in 1922 and went on to study at Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg. His subjects included philosophy, statistics and political economy. German universities were strongholds of the Völkisch movement, and though Kuczynski was a secular Jew, he discovered during his time at Erlangen University that he was not welcome as most of the faculty and the students made it very clear that to them he was just a Jew. Kuczynski was advised not to eat in the student cafeteria and in his diary in 1924 he wrote he felt very keenly of "being Jewish in racial terms", going on to write: "I think I'm the only 'stranger', meaning Jew in town. People turn their heads when they see me walking in the streets". Kuczynski often noted that, though he refused to identify with Judaism as a religion, his "Jewish appearance" as he called it — as he had facial features commonly associated with people of Middle Eastern descent — led others to automatically assume that he was Jewish. In a letter to his parents in 1925, he wrote, "it is virtually impossible to go into a café here without being verbally abused by anti-Semites." In common with many other Jewish intellectuals at the time, Kuczynski grew interested in Marxism with its promise of an utopian society where there would be no more nationalism or religion, and hence the entire Jewish question would be rendered moot. From 1925 onward, he started to read various Marxist tracts. In April 1925, during a visit to Paris, he took part in a demonstration organised by the French Communist Party against the Rif War, which was fired upon by the Paris police, an incident that increased his sympathy with communism. Despite the incident, Kuczynski wrote that no other city in the world "has the magic, the vitality of Paris". In Paris, Kuczynski met the satirist Kurt Tucholsky. Tucholsky, like Kuczynski, longed for a world without the Jewish question, and believed that Marxism, which promised to dissolve all forms of national identify in favor of class struggle, offered the opportunity for that world.

Despite his communist sympathies, in October 1925 Kuczynski went to work at the Bett, Simon & Company bank as an intern, where he did well and was rapidly promoted up the corporate ranks. Kuczynski was soon donating some of his pay earned at the bank to the Communist Party of Germany (, abbreviated KPD), the irony of which did not escape him. In 1926, he published his first book and began to contribute articles to the journal where his left-wing views were readily apparent. Through his parents, he became active in the League for Human Rights, a front organisation for the KPD run by Willi Münzenberg who soon became a major intellectual influence on the younger Kuczynski. Besides Münzenberg, Kuczynski met other prominent people who were members of the League such as Albert Einstein, Ludwig Quidde, and Carl Mertens. At a showing of the 1925 Soviet film Battleship Potemkin, Kuczynski met the Soviet cultural minister Anatoly Lunacharsky and the economist Yevgeny Varga, who became one of Kuczynski's closest friends.

In 1926 he traveled to the United States as a research student, undertaking post-graduate studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Kuczynski wrote extensively, and he shared the economic analyses that he produced for the newspaper with the Soviet ambassador. The German scholar Axel Fair-Schulze argued that values he grew up with "...inoculated Kuczynski against becoming a die-hard Stalinist, despite being politically in tune with the Stalinist line...While he was a faithful Stalinist on the surface, Kuczynski almost instinctively refused to become a mere party soldier".

In January 1933 the Nazi Party took power and quickly set up a one-party state in Germany. Membership of political parties (other than of the Nazi Party) became illegal, and the ban on political parties was enforced with particular effect in respect of (former) Communist Party members. During the next few years, the government increasingly adopted anti-Semitic policies.

During 1933 many German communists were arrested and imprisoned, while many others left the country to avoid the same fate. Sources indicate that as early as February/March 1933 Kuczynski and his wife discussed following his parents and four of Jürgen's five sisters in emigrating to Britain, but they decided to stay in Germany and participate in anti-fascist resistance. During the next three years, their work became increasingly illegal as the government's anti-democratic agenda was enacted. He was also, like his eldest sister Ursula/Ruth, undertaking espionage assignments for the GRU. She operated under the code name "Sonya"

In 1942 Kuczynski was required to tell Hermann Duncker that Duncker's son had been executed, and was expected to convince the father that Soviet justice never made mistakes. Forty years later, Kucynski said he remembered this conversation as one that had caused him much heartache because of the way he had had to assert the infallibility of Stalin's policies "against his own better judgement". He remained a member of the organisation's leadership until he was succeeded by Kurt Hager in the summer of 1944.

During his time in Britain, Kuczynski was constantly watched by MI5 and the Special Branch of Scotland Yard. The Special Branch described him in May 1944 as the "economic expert of the German Communist Party who has been known to us as a Communist since June 1931, when he was employed by the Communist Central Organisation in Berlin. In 1932, he was one of the supporters of the World Anti-War Congress Movement, which was organised by Willi Münzenberg on behalf of the Third International". MI5 in a report described him: "Kuzcynski does not usually overestimate possibilities and indulge in wishful thinking like most Communists are prone to".

In mid-1944 Kuczynski was approached by Joe Gould, a colonel in the US Office of Strategic Services, to help recruit German exiles willing to parachute into Germany for surveillance and resistance work. Kuczynski referred Gould to the London branch of the KPD, and German communist exiles were chosen for the task. (He shared these details with his sister Ursula and therefore with the Soviet Union, as described in Joseph E. Persico's Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents During World War II. )

Based on his recent publications on the German economy, in September 1944 Kuczynski was invited to join the Strategic Bombing Survey; he was given the rank of lieutenant colonel in the US Army Air Force.

As a senior US officer, Kuczynski was first based in the American sector of what later became widely known as West Berlin.

Postwar life in East Germany In 1946 he had been appointed to the teaching chair for Economic History at Berlin University. He was in charge there of the Institute for Economic History until 1956.

On 30 June 1947 he was elected as the first Chairman of the Society for the Study of Soviet Culture (forerunner of the Society for German–Soviet Friendship). He reportedly said to its members, "He who hates and despises human progress as it is manifested in the Soviet Union is himself odious and contemptible." It was widely read in East Germany during the 1980s, and Kuczynski was criticised for it by Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In Dialog mit meinem Urenkel, Kuczynski addressed the question of Stalinism, writing: "If you would ask me if I was happy as a comrade and a scholar in the 'time of Stalin', I can only answer: Yes! Yes! For I was convinced of the greatness and intelligence of Stalin, and did not feel oppressed in my scholarly work, let alone repressed. But don't forget that the effects of Stalinism were slighter in our Party than in the Soviet Union. Our conditions-think of the multi-party system-made the worse crimes impossible, as did the influence of several Party comrades". The scholar John Connolly wrote that there was an element of truth to Kuczynski's account as Stalin did not regard East Germany as permanent and in 1952 offered to allow German reunification provided Germany was neutral, which made establishing "full socialism" undesirable. Connolly wrote that Kuczynski was correct that the East Germany did not have the same "monster show trials" that the other "people's democracies" in Eastern Europe did in the late 1940s-early 1950s, but he ignored that about 2% of the East German population were the victims of government repression, of whom one-tenth died as a result. In Dialog mit meinem Urenkel, Kuczynski did admit to shame over some of his actions in the Stalinist period.

He never lost the confidence of East German leader Erich Honecker, for whom he frequently worked as a speech writer. He also owned an early edition of the Communist Manifesto (a pirate edition printed in 1851), which a more recent ancestor had picked up on a trip to Paris. It is held in the library's historical collection. It is believed to take up "approximately 100 meters of shelf space". but he never won it.

Since 2007 some supporters have proposed renaming the southern part of the Antonplatz ("Anton Square"), in Berlin's Weißensee quarter, as "Jürgen-Kuczynski-Platz". Numerous local residents oppose this idea, but in 2014, proponents were still pushing it.

Published works Jürgen Kuczynski produced approximately 4,000 published pieces of writing, mostly articles but also numerous books; Some of these works were written jointly with others, and the figure appears to include his contributions to academic and other journals. He estimated that roughly 100 were books or substantial pamphlets ("etwa 100 Bücher oder stärkere Broschüren").

Mario Keßler has listed the six most important as follows:

Principal academic works Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter unter dem Kapitalismus (40 volumes) Studien zur Geschichte der Gesellschaftswissenschaften (10 volumes) Geschichte des Alltags des deutschen Volkes (5 volumes)

Works intended for a wider audience A Short History of Labour Conditions Under Industrial Capitalism in the United States of America: 1789-1946 A Short History of Labour Conditions in France: 1700 to the Present Day Jürgen Kuczynski: Dialog mit meinem Urenkel. 19 Briefe und ein Tagebuch. 2nd edition Berlin 1984 (republished in an uncensored edition in 1997, with black margin markings highlighting the sections that were excluded in previous editions) Jürgen Kuczynski: Fortgesetzter Dialog mit meinem Urenkel: Fünfzig Fragen an einen unverbesserlichen Urgroßvater. Berlin 2000 Jürgen Kuczynski: Ein treuer Rebell. Memoiren 1994–1997. Berlin 1998

A number of Kuczyn's writings were translated into English, such as The Rise of the Working Class.

Kuczynski frequently contributed to the weekly arts and politics magazine Die Weltbühne.

Books and articles

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