Wolfgang Duncker

Wolfgang Duncker (5 February 1909 – 20 November 1942) was a German film critic and journalist. The son of political activist parents, in 1929 he himself joined the Communist Party. After the Hitler government took power at the start of 1933 he emigrated, ending up in Moscow from August 1935. He took Soviet citizenship in August 1937 or January 1938, but was arrested by the security services in March 1938 and accused of spying. Sentencing followed on 8 June 1938. He died "of exhaustion" at the Vorkutlag labour camp 2,500 km / 1,600 miles north-east of Moscow,

Biography Provenance and an eventful childhood Wolfgang Duncker was born in Stuttgart, the youngest of his parents' three recorded children. Hermann Duncker (1874–1960), his father, was a trades union activist who later became a founder member of the Communist Party and later still became a professor and dean of faculty at the University of Rostock. His mother, Käte Duncker (1871–1953) was also active in education and politics over many years in, successively, imperial Germany, Weimar Germany, New York City and the German Democratic Republic. Wolfgang attended school in Berlin and then Copenhagen between 1915 and 1919. His mother fled to Denmark after the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, He then completed his schooling between 1925 and 1929 at the venerable Köllnisches Gymnasium (secondary school) in the Berlin quarter of Neukölln.

Erika Early in 1931 Duncker went alone for a stay in Davos, hoping that the famously health-giving high valley air would improve the problems he was having with his lungs. By this time Davos was not merely a health resort but also well established as a winter sports destination. It was expensive and Duncker was unable to afford a hotel room with a mountain view. A sympathetic hotel worker discreetly arranged for him to be smuggled into a more expensive room during the daytime, while the guest who was using it was safely out of the way on the ski slopes. The superior room provided both a view over the mountains and a balcony on which he could sit and gorge himself on the fine mountain air. Nemesis arrived in the form of the room's occupant when she unexpectedly returned early from the slopes and found a strange man sunbathing on her balcony. She asked what he was doing there: surviving sources are silent as to his reply, but the two were married a few months later.

Erika Weiss was a couple of years older than the unexpected visitor in her Davos hotel room. She was Swiss, from a respectable middle-class Basel family. His older brother Karl found his academic career in Berlin blocked and escaped to Cambridge, England where Frederic Bartlett welcomed him with a job. (Karl subsequently moved on again, ending up at Swarthmore College in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. In Autumn 1936 Duncker obtained what appeared to be a permanent position as a film-cutter with Mosfilm ("Мосфильм"). Erika and the baby were left behind in the Moscow apartment. Wolfgang faced trial on 8 June 1938 and was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp. On 11 August 1938, with around 1,200 others, he was taken by train to the Vorkutlag camp 2,500 km / 1,600 miles north-east of Moscow, and well inside the Arctic Circle.

Wolfgang Duncker's parents were both very much alive at the time of his arrest and transfer to the labour camp. His father, having endured an extended period in an internment camp in Morocco, was able to join his wife in America in September 1941, but was still very ill. Käte Duncker had been living in New York since the end of 1936. Despite being devastated by the psychiatric illness and 1940 suicide of her other son, she applied her energies to doing what she could for Wolfgang. She was not without contacts. Surviving correspondence includes letters from friends with well placed contacts inside the Soviet academic establishment, undertaking to intercede on Wolfgang's behalf; but for several years such intercessions appeared to have little practical effect on Wolfgang's situation. Then a contact offered to contact Mikhail Kalinin, a Stalin insider who was known to be sympathetic over the plight of the arrested victims of the leader's purge. The same contact made a direct approach to the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria himself. It seems to have been the direct approach that triggered a letter that Käte Duncker received from Konstantin Umansky, the Soviet ambassador to Washington. Umansky wrote that her daughter-in-law, Erika Duncker, might visit her husband in the labour camp, and should report back on how his health had been shattered. Käte Duncker's subsequent letter to the ambassador, dated 21 February 1941, survives in the archive. She pleaded that Wolfgang's place of detention might be changed for somewhere less dangerous to his life and health. She reminded the ambassador of the Duncker family's long-standing revolutionary activism and assured him that she would be "unendingly grateful" for his help in giving her son back to his family and so secure for the Moscow-based film industry his talent and dedication. Whatever the ambassador's private thoughts, arranging Wolfgang Duncker's rescue from the arctic labour camp was clearly far beyond his powers. Erika's visit to her husband nevertheless went ahead.

Last things In August and September 1939 Erika visited Wolfgang Duncker at the labour camp. The round trip took her approximately a month, travelling by a combination of trucks and trains. She had been allocated two hours but in the end was allowed about five hours with her husband, partly under supervision in the guard room, and partly alone, for what turned out to be their last meeting. She was shocked that her young husband was now ill, aged and emaciated with his front teeth broken, his legs swollen and his complexion pasty and yellowed.

Soon after the visit she remarried. The Soviet authorities had permitted the necessary divorce "at a distance" from an "enemy of the people". Her second husband was also a political exile from Germany, but he had avoided succumbing to the great purge. Wolfgang Duncker died on 20 November 1942, his remaining strength destroyed by four and a half years at the Vorkutlag.

The widow and the orphan Erika Hartmann (as she had now become) remained in the Soviet Union with her new husband, surviving despite the hunger. Boris' half-brother, Rainer Hartmann, was born in 1944. After the war they were able to return to Switzerland, but it was many years before the authorities reinstated the Swiss citizenship that she had forfeited when she married a German communist.

Rehabilitation War ended in 1945, leaving the western two-thirds of Germany divided into four separate occupation zones. The area surrounding Berlin and the eastern half of the city itself were administered as the Soviet occupation zone (after October 1949 the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany)). Wolfgang's mother, Käte Duncker, was now on friendly terms with the country's leaders, and it may be because of this that as early as October 1956 Wolfgang Duncker was posthumously rehabilitated by the Socialist Unity Party which was the country's ruling party. In May 1989 he was also posthumously rehabilitated by the Military State Prosecutor of the Soviet Union, following an order from the Supreme Soviet.