Walter Benjamin derided him as a 'rogue' in 1924. Josef Stalin described him as a 'splendid man', though he soon changed his mind, referring to Scholem as an 'imbecile', while Ernst Thalmann, chairman of the German Communist Party, warned against the dangers of 'Scholemism'. For the philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem, however, Werner was first and foremost his older brother. The life of Weimar Germany's radical politician Werner Scholem (1895-1940) had many facets. Werner and Gerhard, later Gershom, had rebelled together against their authoritarian father and the atmosphere of national chauvinism that permeated Germany during the first world war. Inspiring his younger brother to take up the Zionist cause, Werner himself underwent a long personal journey before deciding to join the struggle for Communism. Scholem climbed the party ladder, pushed forward the 'Bolshevisation' of the KPD, only to be expelled as an opponent of Stalin in 1926. In 1933 he was arrested, and in the summer of 1940 Scholem was murdered in Buchenwald Concentration Camp. This first biography of Werner Scholem tells the story of his life, based on a broad range of original sources and archive material hidden beyond the iron curtain during the cold war era. First published in German by UVK Verlagsgesellschaft as Werner Scholem - eine politische Biographie (1895-1940), Konstanz, 2014.

Author Biography

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 (Brill, 2014).