Akademik

(1902-1937)

   politician; editor of Die rote Fahne, the flagship newspaper* of the KPD. Born to the middle-class home of a Berlin* businessman, he completed Gymnasium in 1920 and was about to begin uni-versity studies when Ernst Reuter* persuaded him to join the KPD. Soon ab-sorbed in Party affairs, he became a full-time official and joined Rote Fahne's editorial board in 1922, the year he first visited the Soviet Union.* Embracing the KPD s leftist opposition, he championed the abortive uprisings of 1923. At Moscow's request he published Maslows Offensive gegen den Leninismus (Mas-low s offensive against Leninism) in 1925, a rebuttal to Arkadi Maslow s 1922 critique of Lenin (Two Revolutions of 1917). The work so pleased Stalin that Neumann served until 1928 as a KPD Comintern representative. A Stalin loyalist who mastered Russian, he was sent to China in 1927 (where opponents referred to him as "the executioner of Canton ), but returned to Berlin as one of the triumvirate (with Ernst Thalmann* and Hermann Remmele*) that made the KPD rigidly subservient to Moscow.

   In October 1928 Neumann replaced Heinrich Susskind as editor of Rote Fahne. He joined the KPD s Zentralkomitee in 1929 as the advocate for expel-ling Party members who diverged from Stalinism; Clara Zetkin* dubbed him the "agent provocateur of expulsions and splits. But by 1930, prompted by the threat of Nazism, he coined the slogan "Hit the fascists wherever you meet them. Perilously out of step with a tactic of portraying the SPD as commu-nism s chief enemy, he was warned by Stalin to strengthen his attacks on social democracy. Nonetheless, horrified by the NSDAP's electoral success of July 1932, he redoubled his efforts to transform the KPD s offensive. Although Rem-mele concurred with his analysis, Neumann was ousted from the KPD leadership in August 1932, forced to resign a Reichstag* mandate he had held since September 1930, and accused at the October 1932 Party Congress of "softening the struggle against social democracy.

   Neumann went to Spain in 1933 to serve the Comintern as a political instruc-tor. He was working in Switzerland in 1934 when his December arrest by Swiss authorities almost brought expulsion to Nazi Germany. At Stalin s intervention, he and his wife (Margarete Buber-Neumann) relocated to the Soviet Union. He worked as a translator in Moscow until 1937, when he was arrested on Stalin's orders and mysteriously vanished.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Buber, Under Two Dictators; Fowkes, Communism in Germany; Stachura, Political Leaders; Ward, " 'Smash the Fas-cists ; Hermann Weber, Kommunismus.