Jürgen Kuczynski

Jürgen Kuczynski (born Elberfeld 17 September 1904: died Berlin 6 August 1997) was a German economist.^[1][2]

Life

Early years

Jürgen Kuczynski was eldest of the six recorded children born to the distinguished economist and demographer Robert René Kuczynski and his wife Berta Gradenwitz/Kuczynski,^[3] who was a painter. The children were gifted and the family was prosperous.^[3] His sister Ursula later became a spy who worked for the Soviet Union.^[4][5] She subsequently became an author, using the name Ruth Werner, by which she is often identified in the sources.

The children grew up in a small villa in the Schlachtensee quarter in the south-west of Berlin. Coming from a distinguished family of Berlin-based left-wing academics, while an adolescent Jürgen Kuczynski met the communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.^[6][7]

Education

Between 1910 and 1916 Kuczynski attended a private school in Berlin-Zehlendorf, before progressing to an academically focused secondary school in the city. He successfully completed his schooling in 1922 and went on to study at Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg subjects that included Philosophy, Statistics and Political economy. In 1926 he went as a research student to the USA where he undertook post-graduate studies at Washington, D.C.'s Brookings Institution.^[1]

Journalism and communism

He returned to Germany in 1929 and settled in Berlin. In 1930 he joined the Communist Party.^[2] Between 1930 and 1933 he contributed to the party newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, in its information department and as its Economics Editor, joining the editorial board in 1931.^[8] Kuczynski's written output was prodigious: the economic analyses that he produced for the newspaper were also shared directly with the Soviet ambassador.

In January 1933 the NSDAP (Nazi party) took power and lost little time in setting 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 it would also become clear that the strident anti-Semitism which had featured in Nazi rhetoric during their years in opposition would be integrated into government policy. Kuczynski was Jewish. 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 into emigration, but at this point they decided to stay in Germany and participate in anti-fascist resistance.^[9] There followed nearly three years of initially legal work that became increasingly illegal as the government's post-democratic agenda was enacted.^[9] Kuczynski continued to provide analytical work on economic and social developments in Germany for the benefit of Communist Party national leaderships.^[9] These were made available to Soviet institutions, used in Soviet newspapers, and employed in propaganda.^[9] He was also active in the Revolutionary Union Opposition (Revolutionäre Gewerkschafts Opposition) movement^[1] until it was completely suppressed in 1935. The risk to Kuczynski of being arrested and having his home ransacked by government agencies was pressing and constant.^[9] During this period he also traveled to Moscow in 1935.^[9] Finally, in January 1936, emigration could be put off no longer^[9] and he moved to Britain.^[2]

English exile

Within Britain his contribution to left wing politics included work on the magazine Labour Monthly, an organ not of the British Labour Party but of the Moscow oriented British Communist Party.^[2] His international academic reputation gained him access to British establishment figures including, according to one source,^[9] the political maverick (and future prime minister) Winston Churchill, and he became a natural leader for the German Communists who had sought refuge in the UK from Naziism.^[9] He maintained regular contacts with the exiled German Communist Party leadership which during the second half of the 1930s was based in Paris, where he and they would meet up to exchange ideas.^[9]

For Britain September 1939 marked the outbreak of the Second World War: Kuczynski was one of many German exiles promptly interned as enemy aliens.^[2] Internees were permitted to talk to one another and he continued his "anti-Fascist" work among his fellow internees.^[9] He was in any event released sooner than most of the Germans caught up in this exercise, following high-level USA intervention with the British authorities.^[9] At some stage during his time in England Kuczynski was recruited by the US Intelligence Services as a Statistician.^[10] He was also, like his sister, undertaking espionage assignments for the Soviet Union.^[2][9]

One of the other German Communist exiles who had fetched up in Britain was a physicist from Leipzig called Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs had also been identified as an enemy alien at the start of the war and arrested, locked away first on the Isle of Man and then in Canada, but he was returned to Britain and released in 1941. Kuczynski and Fuchs now got to know one another, and the economist persuaded the physicist to work for Soviet Intelligence. Kuczynski introduced Fuchs to his sister who at the time was working for the Soviets under the code name "Sonya"^[2] and Sonya became Fuchs's commanding officer within the Soviet intelligence hierarchy. Over the next few years Fuchs and Sonya met regularly in Oxfordshire^[2] where she had moved in order to be closer to her (and Jürgen's) parents (also exiled from Nazi Germany) who had relocated from London at the start of the war. Fuchs was working nearby on some technical challenges associated with developing an atom bomb and the information he was able to pass to the Soviet military via Jürgen's sister "Sonya"/Ursula is thought to have accelerated by several years the arrival of atomic weaponry in the Soviet military arsenal.^[11]

In June 1943 Kuczynski founded in London the Initiative Committee for the Unification of German Emigration, which led to he formation three months later, on 25 September 1943, of a British section of the Soviet sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany.^[1][12] He remained a member of the organisation's leadership till his place was taken by Kurt Hager in the Summer of 1944.^[13]

Kuczynski's work as a Statistician for the Americans was also appreciated, and by 1944/45 he had reached the rank of colonel in the US air force.^[1] Work for the Americans at this time included membership of the team of analysts undertaking the Strategic Bombing Survey.^[1][2] Naturally the analysis produced was shared with Soviet intelligence.^[2]

Return to Germany

At the end of the war, when Kuczynski returned to Germany it was as Lieutenant Colonel in the US army, with a mandate from the Strategic Bombing Survey to get hold of important documentation on German armaments production.^[9] It was also in his capacity as a senior US officer that he personally arrested the industrialist Hermann Schmitz in Heidelberg.^[9] As the Chief Executive Officer of IG Farben, Schmitz was a high-profile war-crimes suspect at the time.^[14]

In terms of the zones of occupation, as a senior US officer Kuczynski's first homebase in post war Germany was in the American sector of what later became widely known as West Berlin.^[2] However, in July 1945 the chief of the Soviet Military Administration in the Soviet occupation zone appointed him President of the Finance Administration in what later became known as East Germany.^[9] Marshal Zhukov was a busy man, and Kuczynski himself learned of his appointment from the Berlin Radio station while traveling back to London.^[9]

In 1947, the year in which his father died in Oxford, Kuczynski renounced his British citizenship with a view to making his permanent home in Germany.^[15] In 1946 he had been appointed to the teaching chair for Economic History at Berlin University, where until 1956 he was in charge of the Institute for Economic History. 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), reportedly warning its members, "He who hates and despises human progress as it is manifested in the Soviet Union is himself odious and contemptible."^[2] He was removed from this position in 1950 which some attributed to a growth in anti-Semitism in the group around Stalin. Between 1949 and 1958 he also sat as a member of the People's Chamber (Volkskammer) which was the country's national legislature.^[1]

At the same time he was one of East Germany's most prominent and productive academics. During his lifetime he published approximately 4,000 pieces of writing.^[2] (Sources differ over the estimated total.^[16]) In 1955 he was founder and chief of the Economic History Department at the German Academy of Sciences as well as for the Institute of Economic History which was tailored to accommodate and benefit from his talents.

As he reached and then passed through the age at which many men retire he continued to occupy a range of important advisory posts and memberships. Above all he continued to write prodigiously, and to present himself, especially to younger government critics, as cheerfully off-beat Marxist thinker. The starting point for his discovery by a new generation of readers was his book published in 1983 entitled "Dialogue with my great grandson" ("Dialog mit meinem Urenkel") ^[6] which was widely read in East Germany during the 1980s and for which even Kuczynski was criticised by The Party. His public lectures were very popular. As a senior member of the country's "revolutionary aristocracy" he was in the end permitted greater freedom (gently) to berate the regime than was allowed to others. He never lost the confidence of the East German leader Erich Honecker, for whom he frequently worked as a speech writer.^[6] And he never lost his Marxist faith: unlike some members of the East German establishment he continued to celebrate the German Democratic Republic and to support the PDS (party) (which inherited the mantle of the SED) in his writing long after the reunification of 1989/90 had opened up the dark side of the old one-party dictatorship to wider and deeper scrutiny.^[6]

Family

Jürgen Kuczynski married the economist and translator Marguerite Steinfeld. The couple had three recorded children, Thomas, Peter and Madeleine.

Thomas, like his father, became a university lecturer and economic historian. Peter, an expert on American civilisation, worked for many years at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg.

Library

As a scion and eldest son from a bookish family, Jürgen Kuczynski inherited many books. The collection went back to the eighteenth century, and he greatly added to it.^[17] His "great grandfather's grandfather" had been an admirer of Immanuel Kant, and had purchased a number of first editions of the Königsberg philosopher's works.^[17] There was also an early edition of the Communist Manifesto (actually only a pirate edition printed in 1851) which a more recent ancestor had picked up on a trip to Paris.^[17] Much of the collection had been left behind (and subsequently lost in the war) when Kuczynski's father, Robert René Kuczynski, had fled to England in the early 1930s, able to rescue only 20,000 books.^[17]

Nevertheless, by the time Jürgen Kuczynski died, he had accumulated a vast and valuable private library of approximately 70,000 volumes.^[17] Kuczynski's library was taken over in 2003 by the Berlin Central and Regional Library^[18] and is accommodated in the library's historical collection where it is believed to take up "approximately 100 meters of shelf space".^[17]

Kuczynski and Stalinism

Kuczynski was frequently identified with Stalinism during the dictator's period in power. After Stalin died, and his successor's "secret Speech" denouncing the abusive excesses of the regime became public, Kuczynski was not the only true believer to find himself invited to recant his constant support for Soviet Communism under Stalin.

But in the academic mind of Jürgen Kuczynski things could never be that simple. "Stalinism" embraced the entire body of spiritual and factual developments during a period of three decades, and outcomes were of course both positive and negative. In the 1950s and 60s Kuczynski openly rejected the newly fashionable denunciation of Stalin as a "continuation of Stalinism" ("Fortsetzung des Stalinismus"), developing a line of argument that will have appealed to the leadership of the Greman Democratic Republic. He was never ready to accept that it might be better to mention Stalin less frequently after the latter had fallen into deep disrepute. Viewing the world through his prism of Economic History, Kuczynski highlighted two major achievements under Stalin. Rapid industrialisation had been achieved with the creation of a vast heavy industrial sector across rural Russia, and that had been a necessary precondition for Stalin's second achievement, the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Beyond all that, Stalin had enjoyed the trust of the Soviet people. Kuczynski contended that the personality cult and the speeches provided the people and the soldiers with moral strength. Critically, he noted that Stalin had abused the trust placed in him, because he had imposed brutal dictatorship. The dictator's talents as a propagandist enabled him to impose dogmas and kill off dialectically objective controversy.

As he would recall in 1983, Stain's purges touched Kuczynski personally in 1942 when he found himself required not merely to deliver to Hermann Duncker the news that Duncker's son had been executed, but also to convince the father that Soviet justice never made mistakes.^[19] Forty years on Kucynski said he remembered his conversation with Duncker as one that had caused him much heartache because of the way he had had to underline the infallibility of Stalin's policies "against his own better judgement".

Awards and honours

• 1949 National Prize of East Germany
• 1964 Banner of Labor
• 1969 Order of Karl Marx
• 1974 National Prize of East Germany
• 1979 Star of People's Friendship
• 1984 Patriotic Order of Merit
• 1989 Patriotic Order of Merit Gold clasp

Kuczynski was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Economics,^[20] though he never actually won it.

In Berlin's Weißensee quarter, proposals which date back to 2007 to rename the southern part of the Antonplatz ("Anton Square") as "Jürgen-Kuczynski-Platz"^[21] have proved controversial with local residents, but proponents have not given up on the idea.^[22]

Published output

Jürgen Kuczynski produced approximately 4,000 published pieces of writing^[2] with some sources giving a significantly higher estimate even than that.^[16][21] Some of this output was written jointly with others, and the figure appears to include his contributions to academic and other journals. His own casual estimate was 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) ISBN 3-89438-191-4

Works intended for a wider audience

• 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

Kuczynski was also a tireless contributor to the weekly arts and politics magazine Die Weltbühne.

References