Kurt Rosenfeld

Kurt Rosenfeld (1 February 1877 – 25 September 1943) was a German lawyer and politician (SPD). He was a member of the national parliament between 1920 and 1932.

Early life Kurt Samuel Rosenfeld was born into a Jewish family at Marienwerder, a mid-sized town in what was then West Prussia and is now Kwidzyn in Poland. Between 1896 and 1899 he studied jurisprudence and social economics at Freiburg (where one of his teachers was Max Weber), then moving on to Berlin from where he graduated in 1905 with a doctorate in law. For most of this time he was on the left wing of the SPD. He was also building a reputation as a trial lawyer: during this period he defended like-minded political comrades including Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner and Georg Ledebour. Other left wing Berlin politicians in his circle included Clara Zetkin, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring, Karl Radek and Anton Pannekoek.

Socialist Workers' Party activism 1931-1933 In 1931 Rosenfeld was one of six left-wing SPD members of parliament excluded from the SPD group in the Reichstag following a "breach of party discipline". At the heart of the disagreement was the decision of the party leadership under Otto Wels to "tolerate" the Brüning government, in a desperate - and with the benefit of hindsight unsuccessful - attempt to "stabilize the tottering state" and avert a Nazi take-over. Rosenfeld and fellow-expellee Max Seydewitz now founded the Socialist Workers' Party ( / SAPD). Rosenfeld and Seydewitz became co-chairmen of the new party serving, in Rosenfeld's case, till the early part of 1933. Kurt Rosenfeld was one of those involved in the London "counter-trial" which received much press coverage in English-speaking parts of the world. However, by the end of 1934 he had settled not in London but in the United States where he worked closely with exiled German communists. It seems likely that at some stage he himself joined the exiled German Communist Party.