Walter Benjamin derided Werner Scholem as a 'rogue' in 1924. Josef Stalin referred him as a 'splendid man', but soon backtracked and labelled him an 'imbecile', while Ernst Thalmann, chairman of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), warned his followers against the dangers of 'Scholemism'. This first biography of Werner Scholem tells his life story by drawing on a wide range of original sources and archive material long hidden beyond the Iron Curtain of the Cold War era.

Features in Historical Materialism

Promotion targeting left academic journals

Published to coincide with the annual Historical Materialism conference

Publicity and promotion in conjunction with the author's speaking engagements

About the Author
Ralf Hoffrogge, Dr. phil. (2013), University of Potsdam, is Postdoctoral Researcher at Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (Germany) and has published widely on German labour history. His latest publication is Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Muller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement (Haymarket Books, 2015).

Reviews

"Werner Scholem was a leading light of the left wing of the Communist
Party of Germany in the 1920s. A new biography by Ralf Hoffrogge
presents a revolutionary life that refused all compromise."

-Nathaniel Flakin, Left Voice

"The most interesting parts of Hoffrogge's work are perhaps the thick descriptions of the Weimar Republic's communist milieu with its peculiar mixture of dogmatism and careerism, male chauvinism and women's emancipation, puritanism and sexual permissiveness. The interesting figure here is Scholem's wife Emmy, who came from humble background, eager to learn and climb the social ladder, aware of her chances for emancipation and equipped with all the weapons of a woman."

-Gerd Koenen, DIE ZEIT

"...in the field of historical research, it is the more refined work by Ralf Hoffrogge that will make a lasting impression. His reconstruction of events is the only one that allows us to understand Scholem's arrest and trial..."

-Lorenz Jaeger, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"...Two recently published biographies that could not be more different are devoted to the life of this exceptional politician, to whom the historian Miriam Zadoff attributed an "agile temperament", but also depicted him in an apotheosis of suffering, comparing Scholem to the biblical Job. Quite different is the sober reconstruction of the historian Ralf Hoffrogge, invariably oriented towards the facts. Almost entirely without gaps, this political biography reconstructs the twisted lifeline of Scholem in the context of its time. The merit of both biographies consists not least in the fact that here for the first time a personality is portrayed who embodied in his intellectual and political action the intrinsic ambiguity of the period between the two world wars."

-Wolf Scheller in Judische Allgemeine Zeitung

"Hoffrogge's narrative, expanding beyond Scholem's tragic life trajectory, highlights numerous biographically relevant subjects: the genesis and political development of the Weimar Republic and the place of the KPD within it; the difficult relationship between Western communist parties and the Soviet Union; the prejudices communists of Jewish origin faced within and outside their movement; and even of the emergence of the Nazi concentration camp system"

-Ferdinand Schoning in East Central Europe Journal

Book Information
ISBN 9781608469963
Author Ralf Hoffrogge
Format Paperback
Page Count 667
Imprint Haymarket Books
Publisher Haymarket Books