Franz Borkenau

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Franz Borkenau (December 15, 1900-May 22, 1957) was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis. In 1921, Borkenau joined the Communist Party of Germany and was active as a Comintern agent until 1929. After graduating from the University of Leipzig in 1924, Borkenau moved to Berlin. In 1929, Borkenau resigned from both the Comintern and the KPD owing to his personal repulsion and disgust over the way the Communists operated, combined with an increasing horror over Stalinism.

Despite his break with Communism, Borkenau remained on the Left and worked as a researcher for the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. During his time at the Frankfurt Institute, Borkenau was a protégé of Carl Grünberg and his main interest was the relationship between capitalism and ideology. In 1933, the half-Jewish Borkenau fled from Germany and lived at various times in Vienna, Paris and Panama City.

In September 1936, Borkenau paid a two-month visit to Spain, where he observed the effects of Spanish Civil War in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. In course of his Spanish trip, Borkenau was much disillusioned by the behavior of the agents of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD in Spain and of the Spanish Communist Party. In January 1937, Borkenau made a second visit to Spain, during which he was arrested and tortured by Spanish Communists before being released. Borkenau’s experience inspired his best-known book, The Spanish Cockpit. During World War II, Borkenau lived in London, and worked as a writer for Cyril Connolly's journal Horizon.

In 1947, Borkenau returned to Germany to work as a professor at the University of Marburg. In 1950, Borkenau attended the conference in Berlin together with other anti-Communist intellectuals such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook and Melvin J. Lasky that led to the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Borkenau was very active in the Congress, and was often attacked by Marxist intellectuals such as Isaac Deutscher for his fierce anti-Communism. Borkenau was a leading advocate for the Totalitarianism school.

In the 1950s, Borkenau was well-known as an expert on Communism and the Soviet Union. Borkenau was one of the founders of Sovietology. Borkenau’s techniques were a minute analysis of official Soviet statements and the standing arrangement at the Kremlin on official occasions to determine what Soviet leader was in Joseph Stalin's favor and what leader was not. Another area of interest for Borkenau was in engaging in an intellectual critique of Arnold J. Toynbee and Oswald Spengler's work over when and why civilizations decline and die. The latter critique was published posthumously by his friend Richard Löwenthal. Borkenau became increasing active as a free-lance author living in Paris, Rome and Zurich, where in the latter city he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1957.

[edit] Work

The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World View, 1934.
Pareto, New York : Wiley, 1936.
The Spanish Cockpit : an Eye-Witness Account of the Political and Social Conflicts of the Spanish Civil War, London : Faber and Faber, 1937.
Austria and After, London, Faber and Faber 1938.
The Communist International, London : Faber and Faber, 1938.
The Totalitarian Enemy, London, Faber and Faber 1940.
Socialism, National or International, London, G. Routledge 1942.
European Communism, New York : Harper, 1953.
World communism; a History of the Communist International, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1962.
End and Beginning : on the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West, edited with an introduction by Richard Lowenthal, New York : Columbia University Press, 1981.

[edit] References

Laqueur, Walter The Fate of the Revolution : Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present, New York : Scribner, 1987 ISBN 0-684-18903-8.
Jones, William David The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. ISBN 0-252-06796-7.