Research Notes: Horkheimer's Marx/ism-Studies (1919-1927)

Three reading lists.

May 16, 2025

Conrad Felixmüller, A. Krapp. *Die Aktion*, vol. 9, no. 26/27. July 5, 1919

Notes for future research on Horkheimer’s reception of Marx/ism and the reception of Marx/ism by the core members of the ISR more broadly. In the future, my plan is to look more closely at Carl Grünberg’s Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (1911-1930) in particular, since it was the medium through which the early critical theorists of the ‘Frankfurt School’ would have read Lukacs and Korsch and features contributions from Horkheimer, Pollock, Felix Weil, and a number of understudied contributors to the 1920s ISR such as Karl Schmückle.1 Some of these PDFs are tricky to find, so let me know if you’d like me to send you any of the PDFs of Die Aktion (should be available through archive.org), the Freiburg Notebooks (should be available through the digitized portion of the Max Horkheimer Nachlass), or the two volumes of the Marx-Engels Archiv (which I finally managed to find through embedded links on foreign language social media sites).

Research Notes on Horkheimer’s Marxism-Studies.

List I: Die Aktion (February, 1919).
List II: Freiburg Notebooks (1921).
List III: Marx-Engels Archiv (1925/26-1927).

List I: Die Aktion (February, 1919).

“Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht. Zum Gedächtnis” (February, 1919)

Horkheimer’s earliest exposure to socialist literature was primarily through the literary-political magazine Die Aktion (1911-1932), edited by Franz Pfemfert. Horkheimer had been an avid reader since the beginning of the war—at first, this was most likely because the magazine promoted and published the kind of expressionist literature Horkheimer was so drawn to and influenced by in his own literary experiments in the mid-1910s; later on, towards the end of the war and the events leading up to and from the November Revolution, but especially after the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht on January 5th, 1919, the magazine “became even more explicit in its commitment to radical democratic socialism” in their spirit, and, John Abromeit (2004) observes, “Horkheimer’s own development at this time closely paralleled that of his favorite journal.”2 In February 1919, Horkheimer writes a letter to Maidon (Horkheimer’s nickname for Rose Riekher; they would marry in 1926) recommending the final section of Luxemburg’s Junius-pamphlet, along with of a suite of her other political writings, in the February issue of Die Aktion memorializing Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in response to their murders just one month prior: “[R]ead it from beginning to end, without leaving out a single line; it provides an outline of our political views.”3 Aside from Loralea Michaelis’ excellent “Temporality and Revolution in Horkheimer’s Early Critical Theory: A Luxemburgian Reading of Dämmerung” (2018), which traces the formulations of Horkheimer’s Dämmerung (1934) back to Luxemburg’s conclusion to the Junius-pamphlet (see Note 2: Horizon of Dämmerung), almost no work has been done on the conceptual reconstruction of Horkheimer’s foundational communist orientation which arises from his early encounter with the writings of revolutionary Marxists. The following list should therefore be read as a task for future study of the political culture of early critical theory.

Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht. Zum Gedächtnis.4

Holtz, Karl: [Invalide]. Sp. 59
Berlit, Rüdiger: Trauer. Sp. 62
Goll, Iwan: Litanei zu Liebknechts Tod. Sp. 62–63
Hirsch, Karl Jakob: Karl Liebknecht. Sp. 63
N. N.: Wenn Wilhelm II. ermordet worden wäre. Sp. 63–67
Berlit, Rüdiger: Trauer. Sp. 65–66
Luxemburg, Rosa: Für die internationale Solidarität. Sp. 67–69
Liebknecht, Karl: Aus einer Rede: Imperialismus und Krieg. Sp. 69–71

[Karl Liebknecht—”Imperialism and War”]

Liebknecht, Karl: Aus einem Brief. Sp. 71–72
Liebknecht, Karl: Liebknechts Sonderabstimmung im Reichstag. Sp. 72–73

[Karl Liebknecht—[re: the vote against the War Credit Bill], 12/2/1914.]

Ehrenstein, Albert: Urteil. Sp. 73
Liebknecht, Karl: Der neue Burgfrieden. Sp. 73–75

[Karl Liebknecht—”The New Burgfrieden,” 11/19/1918.]

Luxemburg, Rosa: Eine Ehrenpflicht. Sp. 75–77

[Rosa Luxemburg—“A Duty of Honor,” November 1918.]

Luxemburg, Rosa: Wladimir Korolenko. Sp. 77–80

[Rosa Luxemburg—“Life of Korolenko,” July 1918.]

Luxemburg, Rosa: Rede vor dem bürgerlichen Gericht. Sp. 80–83
Mathey, Georg A.: Aufstieg. Sp. 81–82
Liebknecht, Karl: Schlusswort im Prozess gegen K. Liebknecht. Sp. 83–84
Pfemfert, Franz: Kleiner Briefkasten. Sp. 84–86
Berlit, Rüdiger: Widmungsblatt für die Aktion. Sp. 87–88

List II: Freiburg Notebooks (1921).

In the archival research for his dissertation (2004),5 John Abromeit identified several notebooks dating back to Horkheimer’s stay in Freiburg in 1921 that contained extensive notes on Marx’s Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie and Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach, und der Ausgang der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie, in addition to a number of books ranging from systematic presentations of Marx’s mature theoretical system, such as L.B. Boudin’s Das Theoretische System von Karl Marx, to Gustav Landauer’s Aufruf zum Sozialismus, an anarchist critique of Marxian socialism. An important side-note: these notebooks also contain notes on Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which Horkheimer reread in full alongside his studies in Marx/ism. Deciphering these Freiburg notebooks is another desiderata for future research.

Location: MHA [601] (S. VII.2).

[1] Heft mit Exzerpten über: Gustav Landauer, Arthur Wolfgang Cohn, Karl Vorländer, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, L. B. Boudin, Karl Marx und Arthur Schopenhauer von Max Horkheimer. 1921 (S. VII.2) (Manuskript, 42 Blatt);

List III: Marx-Engels Archiv (1925/26-1927).

It has long been acknowledged that Horkheimer’s reception of Marx was unique. In the course of the 1920s, the Institute for Social Research (ISR), under the directorship of Carl Grünberg (1924-1928/29), and the Marx-Engels Institute (MEI) in Moscow, founded and still under the directorship of David Ryazanov (1920-1931), would collaborate on the preparation and printing of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA¹). The height of their collaboration was around 1927, the year the ISR helped oversee the publication of the first of the 12-volumes of MEGA¹ in Frankfurt a.M., and the MEI would rely on the archival work and connections the ISR provided them to continue printing volumes of the MEGA¹ in Frankfurt and Berlin until 1933 (volumes MEGA¹were thrown into the Nazi bonfires of May 1933) and the collection of manuscripts was smuggled out of Germany.6 Aside from its essential role as an intermediary between the SPD, who controlled the Marx-Engels archives in Germany, and the MEI, the ISR also promoted the work published in the MEI’s house journal, the Marx-Engels Archiv (MEA), through Carl Grünberg’s long-running Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (1911-1930), and oversaw the publication of two volumes of the MEA, edited by Ryazanov himself, in 1926 and 1927.7 In these two volumes of the MEA, a number of texts from the Marx-Engels Nachlass were published for the first time that would not again be available in print until 1932, after Ryazanov’s forced removal from the MEI in 1931,8 in several volumes of the MEGA¹devoted to Marx and Engels’ post-1844 writings that were prepared under Ryazanov’s direction.9 The most important for Horkheimer’s theoretical development were documents on the materialist theory of history: “I. Feuerbach,” the first section of The German Ideology, Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845),10 and the correspondence between Karl Marx and Vera Zasulich (1881). Due to his semi-official affiliation with the ISR throughout the 1920s, Horkheimer would have had access to The German Ideology as early as 1925, and his rapid incorporation of and experimentation with its ‘materialist theory of history’ is evident from the notes and manuscripts for the lectures Horkheimer delivered on the history of modern philosophy and problems in contemporary philosophy as a Privatdozent between 1925/26 and 1930. While the connection between Horkheimer’s early social-theoretical writings and The German Ideology has been treated in the secondary literature,11 I am not aware of any study of Horkheimer’s possible reception of Marx’s correspondence with Zasulich. Given that an essential aspect of Horkheimer’s late-1920s conception of historical materialism is an anti-metaphysical critique of the philosophy of history, such a study might prove fruitful. Finally, the fact that Horkheimer, Pollock, and Felix Weil’s exposure to Marx and Engels in the MEA was quite possibly shaped by accompanying early German translations of texts from debates in so-called ‘Eastern Marxism,’ such as A. Deborin’s series on the history of dialectics and selections from I. I. Rubin on Marx’s theory of value and debates in political economy, seems to pose significant problems for the legend of so-called ‘Western Marxism.’ Philipp Lenhard (2024) notes:

The Soviet economist Korsch mentioned in his letter, Isaac Illich Rubin, a long neglected early expert on Marx, did not attend [Pollock’s] seminar in person but might as well have done, given how prominently his publications featured in its discussions. His Studien zur Marxschen Werttheorie (Studies on Marx’s Value Theory), published in German in 1924, held canonical status at the institute. His essay, ‘Abstract Labour and Value in Marx’s System’ (published in Russian in 1927), coincides thematically with Pollock’s own doctoral research and the overlap between their positions would merit closer scrutiny.12

Marx-Engels-Archiv. Band I-II. 1926-1927 (Zeitschrift des Marx-Engels Instituts in Moskau. Hrsg. von D. Rjazanov. Frankfurt a.M.)

Marx-Engels-Archiv. Bd. I. [1926]13

I. Abhandlungen.

A. Deborin: Die Dialektik bei Kant (Studien zur Geschichte der Dialektik. I) [7]
V. Volgin: Über die historische Stellung St.-Simons [82]
D. Rjazanov: Die Entstehung der Internationalen Arbeiter-Assoziation (Zur Geschichte der Ersten Internationale. I) [119]

II. Aus dem Literarischen Nachlass von Marx und Engels

Marx und Engels über Feuerbach (Erster Teil der “Deutschen Ideologie”). Herausgegeben von D. Rjazanov

Einführung des Herausgebers [205]
Die Thesen über Feuerbach (nach dem Originalmanuskript, mit Faksimilie) [222]
Entwurf von Marx zu einer Vorrede zur “Deutschen Ideologie” [230]
Feuerbach. Gegensatz von materialistischer und idealistischer Anschauung [233]
A. Die Ideologie überhaupt, namentlich die deutsche [235]
B. Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Individuum und ihre Geschichte in materialistischer Anschauung [298]
C. Verhältnis von Staat und Recht zum Eigentum [298]
- Teilung der Arbeit und Formen des Eigentums [303]

III. Briefe und Dokumente

Briefwechsel zwischen Vera Zasulich und Marx. Herausgegeben von D. Rjazanov. Mit einem Faksimilie

Einführung des Herausgebers [309]
Zasulich an Marx (16. Februar 1881) [316]
Antwort von Marx (Die Entwürfe I-IV. Der Brief vom 8. März 1881) [341]

IV. Literatur

Historischer Materialismus

J. Luppol: Kant oder Marx? [345]
G. Tymjanskij: Neuere Schriften über den historischen Materialismus [353]

Politische Ökonomie

J. Rubin: Zwei Schriften über die Marxsche Werttheorie [360]
J. Rubin: Stolzmann als Marx-Kritiker [370]

Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung

E. Kosminskij: Der englische Arbeiter im Zeitalter der industriellen Revolution [387]
Th. Rothstein: Neuere Literatur über den Chartismus [408]
E. Czóbel: Der Kölner Arbeiterverein 1848/49 [429]

V. Mitteilungen

Papers of the First International (The George Howell Collection). Communication by W. Raymond Postgate [441]
Über das Marx-Engels-Institut in Moskau [448]
Die Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe [461]

VI. Bibliographie

Die Literatur über Marx, Engels und den Marxismus seit dem Weltkriege. Versuch eine systematischen Bibliographie [469]
Mit zwei Beilagen:

I. Über das Marx-Engels-Institute [528]
II. Die Lassalle-Literatur seit dem Weltkriege [530]

[Zusammengestellt von E. Czóbel und P. Hadju.]

Marx-Engels-Archiv. Bd. II. [1927]14

I. Abhandlungen.

A. Deborin, Die Dialektik bei Fichte (Studien zur Geschichte der Dialektik. II) [3]
E. Tarlé, Der Lyoner Arbeiteraufstand [56]

II. Aus dem Literarischen Nachlass von Marx und Engels

Friedrich Engels, Dialektik und Natur. Herausgegeben von D. Rjazanov

Einleitung des Herausgebers [117]
Dialektik und Naturwissenschaft [151]
Die Naturforschung in der Geisterwelt [207]
Alte Vorrede zum “Anti-Dühring.” — Über die Dialektik (1878) [217]
Noten zum “Anti-Dühring”
a) Über die Urbilder des mathematisch “Unendlichen” in der wirklichen Welt [225]
b) Über die mechanische Naturauffassung [230]
c) Über Nägelis Unfähigkeit, das Unendliche zu erkennen [234]
Alte Einleitung zur “Naturdialektik” (1880) [239]
Notizen (1881-1882) [256]
Allgemeine Natur der Dialektik als Wissenschaft [285]
Maß der Bewegung — Arbeit [307]
Flutreibung. Kant und Thomson-Tait. Erdrotation und Monadanziehung [320]
Wärme [325]
Elektrizität [329]
Ausgelassenes aus “Feuerbach” (1886) [382]
Karl Schorlemmer (1892) [386]
Verzeichnis der benutzten Werke [389]
Namenregister [393]

Friedrich Engels, Vorarbeiten zum “Anti-Dühring.” Herausgegeben von D. Rjazanov [396]

Friedrich Engels, Sieben Rezensionen über den ersten Band des “Kapital.” Mit Einführung von Ernst Czóbel.

Einführung [427]
Rezensionen I-VII [442]

III. Miszellen

F.P. Schiller, Georg Weber, ein Mitarbeiter des Pariser “Vorwärts” [465]
Unbekannte Briefe von Lassalle [473]
F.P. Schiller, Friedrich Engels und die Schiller-Anstalt in Manchester [483]

IV. Literatur

A. Thalheimer, Über die soziologische Methode [497]

S. Lurje, Der Sozialismus im Altertum [509]

K. Schmückle, Zur Geschichte der politischen Theorien [518]

Deutsche Doktordissertationen über Themen der Marx-Engels-Forschung (Berichte über ungedruckte Inaugural-Dissertationen)

Vorbemerkung [548]
Historischer Materialismus [552]
Politische Ökonomie [570]
Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung [584]

See: Kaan Kangal, “Karl Schmückle and Western Marxism.” Revolutionary Russia, 31:1 (2018), 67-85. [link]

And: Kaan Kangal, “A Marxist Utopian Between East and West: Karl Schmückle. A Review of Begegnungen mit Don Quijote. Ausgewählte Schriften by Karl Schmückle.” [link]

John D. Abromeit, The Dialectic of Bourgeois Society: An Intellectual Biography of the Young Max Horkheimer, 1895-1937. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (2004), 61-62; 67-68.

Loralea Michaelis, “Temporality and Revolution in Horkheimer’s Early Critical Theory: A Luxemburgian Reading of Dämmerung.” In: Telos 185 (Winter 2018), 132-133. [Footnote 10]

Die Aktion. Wochenschrift für Politik, Literatur, Kunst. Hrsg. von Franz Pfemfert. IX. Jahrg., Nr. 2-5, 1. Februar 1919. [Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht. Zum Gedächtnis.] Zeichnung auf Titelblatt von von Karl Jakob Hirsch: Karl Liebknecht. Verlag / Die Aktion / Berlin-Wilmersdorf.

Abromeit, The Dialectic of Bourgeois Society (2004), 81-82.

Translation of the entry ‘MEGA’ in the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus [HKWM]), vol. 9/I (Hamburg: Argument, 2018), pp. 388-404. Part I written by Rolf Hecker, Manfred Neuhaus, Richard Sperl, and part II by Hu Xiaochen. [link]

Anderson, Kevin. 2001. “Uncovering Marx’s yet Unpublished Writings∗ .” Critique 29 (1): 179–87. [link]

Jürgen Rojahn, “The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA): State of Affairs and Prospects.” International Review of Social History, 1992, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1992), 304-314.

Yulan Zhao (2013) “The Historical Birth of the First Historical–Critical Edition of Marx–Engels-Gesamtausgabe,” Critique, 41:3, 317-337.

Yulan Zhao (2013) “The Historical Birth of the First Historical–Critical Edition of Marx–Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Part 2,” Critique, 41:4, 475-494.
Yulan Zhao (2014) “The Historical Birth of the First Historical-Critical Edition of Marx–Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Part 3,” Critique, 42:1, 11-24.

Re: Ryaznov and the ISR, see: Bud Burkhard: “Rjazanov's ties to Grünberg’s Institute for Social Research proved crucial to the operations of the Marx-Engels Institute. Each week documents were brought from the SPD archives in Berlin, photostated in Frankfurt, and then sent on to Moscow. The materials later appeared in the Marx-Engels Collected Works; Letopisi Marksizma carried a number of smaller pieces while the Archiv K. Marksa i F. Engel'sa contained the ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ the first section of the German Ideology, and all of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature. The third volume of the Archiv contained the bulk of Marx’s ‘third Economic and Philosophic Manuscript’ as well as his ‘Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of State.’ Grünberg assisted in the publishing of a German edition of the Archiv (two volumes, 1926-27) as well as the famous Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. An affiliate of the Frankfurt Institute, Friedrich Pollock, visited Moscow at Rjazanov's invitation in 1927. A great deal of space in the Grünberg Archiv was devoted to the publications and operations of the Moscow Institute, thus enhancing its reputation in more scholarly circles.” In: “D.B. Rjazanov and the Marx-Engels Institute: Notes toward Further Research.” Studies in Soviet Thought, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jul., 1985), 42.

See also: Rolf Wiggershaus, on the history of the Marx-Engels ‘Archive’ in Frankfurt under Grünberg: “In the 1920s the publications of the Marx-Engels Archive Publishers amounted to only half a dozen volumes of MEGA, the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), and two volumes of a journal, the Marx-Engels Archiv. Along with essays by Russian Marx researchers, part of Marx's German Ideology and the correspondence between Karl Marx and Vera Zasulich were published in the journal.” In: The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson (Polity Press, 1994), 31-33.

Cf. Lenhard (2024): “As an episode that has hitherto drawn insufficient attention illustrates, this transformation also made itself felt in the institute. Following the October Revolution, the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Russia decided to create an institute for the collection and preservation of the Marxist heritage and the production of both popular and scholarly editions of the writings of Marx and Engels. The Marx Engels Institute (MEI) undoubtedly served propaganda purposes too, but the appointment of its first director indicated an ideological open-mindedness that would have been inconceivable under Stalin. The appointment went to David Borisovich Riazanov, a Jewish Marxist, born in Odessa in 1870, who, prior to the First World War, had sympathised with the Socialist Revolutionary Narodniki before shifting his allegiance to the Marxist labour movement. He was chosen for the position because, although its publication was ultimately prevented by the turmoil of the war, he was well respected for his edition of the minutes and documents of the First International. Riazanov had long wanted to publish an edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels (MEGA), an endeavour that initially garnered enthusiastic support from the Bolshevik Central Committee. The principal challenge for Riazanov lay in the fact that Marx’s manuscripts and documents were dispersed across Europe and partly in private ownership. A significant part of the material was owned by the SPD archive and Karl Kautsky, whose relationship to the Russian Communists was ambivalent at best. Riazanov therefore needed an ally who could mediate between the MEI and the SPD. Given that Riazanov and the exceedingly well connected Grünberg had a long-standing working relationship, the Institute of Social Research seemed the ideal candidate for this role. On 20 August 1924, just after its inauguration, the institute signed a cooperation agreement with the Marx Engels Institute Publishing Company Ltd. It was run by Felix Weil and Friedrich Pollock. Riazanov’s former colleague, Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevsky, who, as a leading Menshevik, had left the Soviet Union in 1922 and was now based in Berlin, coordinated the inventorisation, production of photographic copies and collation of the material on behalf of the Moscow institute and became Pollock and Weil’s principal point of contact. For several years, Pollock, Weil and Nikolaevsky, joined in 1925 by Hans Jäger, invested a great deal of energy into acquiring the documents and sending photocopies to Russia. ‘The photostatic copying of the Marx Engels Papers’, Weil later recalled, ‘also happened in the institute with the approval of the spd executive’. A staff of six, working in two shifts, was tasked with copying the 150,000 pages in the institute’s basement. A courier then collected the copies and transported them to the Soviet embassy in Berlin. ‘From there, they went by diplomatic courier to the Marx Engels Institute in Moscow. All the papers were copied in this way. The Marx Engels Institute then prepared the volumes for publication by the Marx Engels Archive publishing enterprise which was initially based in Frankfurt.’ The first issue of the supplementary journal, Marx Engels Archiv, came out in 1925, and the first part of the first MEGA volume—containing Werke und Schriften bis Anfang 1844 nebst Briefen und Dokumenten (Works and Writings up to Early 1844 as Well as Letters and Documents)—was published in 1927. The publication date was intentionally chosen to mark the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, celebrated in Moscow with much ado. On Riazanov’s recommendation, Pollock was invited to attend the official ceremony, which was quite a privilege. He arrived in the capital of the ‘Workers’ Fatherland’ on 25 October 1927 and stayed for an entire month. The MEI put him up in a hotel and let it be known that he should consider himself a guest of the institute. On 7 November 1927, along with numerous other Western authors, cultural figures and academics supportive of the Soviet cause, Pollock witnessed a huge parade organised by the regime on Red Square. The parade was followed by a march of 600,000 workers sporting banners, pennants and flags. Reflecting on this event, the expressionist poet Armin T. Wegner resorted to religious metaphors, characterising it as a ‘pilgrimage to the red Jerusalem’. The author Joseph Roth had attended the official May Day rally in Moscow the year before. Even though he hardly sympathised with the Bolsheviks he penned an enthusiastic report: ‘This march-past is the most forceful military spectacle of our age and likely since Napoleon. Repeated so and so many times, it loses none of its force and is always fresh.’ Yet unlike many other Western communist intellectuals, Pollock was no mere political tourist. Inspired by Felix Weil’s research on socialisation, he had developed an interest in problems pertaining to the planned economy and decided to study the Soviet economic order. His stay in Moscow offered him the rare opportunity to observe institutions involved in the planning process at close quarters, consult practitioners and gather a wealth of relevant source material. He took copious notes on everything he heard and observed and amassed a substantial collection of pamphlets, directives, internal memoranda, flyers, scholarly publications and economic plans. The MEI and Riazanov in particular made every effort to support his research and opened quite a few doors for him that would otherwise presumably have remained closed. What he observed was a serious and sincere attempt to graft a planned industrial economy onto the semi-feudal relations of production in a country significantly lagging behind technologically and characterised by mass poverty and recurring famines. Could this endeavour succeed? How did the dictatorship of the Communist party impact the small leaseholders and farm labourers who still formed the majority of the population? What might one learn in the West from the Soviet project? When Pollock left Moscow, he had not yet reached a judgement. The letter he wrote to Riazanov following his return of Frankfurt to thank him for his support during his stay in Moscow clearly indicated that he had gone to the Soviet Union not to indulge romantic notions regarding the revolution or the workers but to undertake research. ‘Having arrived in Frankfurt safe and sound’, he wrote, ‘I would like to assure you and your wife of my sincere gratitude for your warm welcome and emphatic support in Moscow. Without your help I would surely have been unable to gain such a thorough overview over the evolving Soviet economy in the few weeks I was able to spend in Moscow.’” In: Friedrich Pollock: The Éminence Grise of the Frankfurt School. Translated by Lars Fischer. (Brill, 2024 [Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019]), 61-64.

Philipp Lenhard (2024): “Meanwhile, rather fittingly, the cooperation between the Institute of Social Research and the Marx Engels Institute was drawing to a close. ‘Dear Comrade Riazanov!’ Pollock wrote in a letter dated 16 July 1928, perhaps ‘you will consider whether comrade Czobel [the deputy director of the MEI] might come here on or after 10 August so we can discuss all the issues concerning the dissolution of our “marriage” in detail’. Both parties had reasons for wanting to terminate the cooperation. Having obtained copies of most of Marx and Engels’s papers, Moscow wanted to take full control of the MEGA. The institute in Frankfurt, on the other hand, under pressure for supposedly being too close to Moscow (we may recall the internal report by Frankfurt’s police chief of 1926), was not at all unhappy to cap its actual connections with the mei. Relations were further complicated by the fact that Grünberg suffered a massive stroke in January 1928, leaving Pollock to run the institute’s affairs as acting director. The termination of the cooperation agreement coincided with the domestic transformation of the Soviet Union. The Communist party viewed the MEGA, the close relations to Social Democrats such as Eduard Bernstein the work on the edition entailed and Riazanov himself with increasing suspicion. In 1930, the MEI was purged: 131 of its 243 employees were dismissed. On 15 February 1931, Riazanov was arrested, accused of being involved in a Menshevik conspiracy and exiled to Saratov. He was initially able to continue with his scholarly work, but the Great Terror eventually caught up with him. Re-arrested in July 1937, he resolutely refused to confess to any crimes or implicate anyone else. He was executed in January 1938. The MEGA, of which only a handful of volumes had been published, was aborted. At this point, the institute’s Marxist period, in the narrower sense of the word, ended. Grünberg’s stroke had left him severely incapacitated, and Pollock, who was now in charge of the institute, paved the way for Grünberg’s replacement by a close associate: his friend and housemate Max Horkheimer. To be sure, Pollock continued to draw on Marxian concepts for the rest of his life but the critical distance he had put between himself and the orthodox party Communism of the KPD was a crucial prerequisite for the subsequent development of an undogmatic critical social theory.” In: Ibid., 67-68.

Re: the work on MEGA¹ under Ryazanov:

Under Riazanov’s supervision, the institute published three volumes from the first section [volumes I/1.1 (1927), I/1.2 (1929), and I/2 (1930) on Marx’s works and writings up to the beginning of 1844, including letters and documents], and three volumes from the third section [volumes III/1 (1929), III/2 (1930), and III/3 (1930) on Marx–Engels correspondence between 1844 and 1853, 1854 and 1860, and 1861 and 1867]. The institute also prepared four volumes from the first section [The German Ideology in I/5 (1932), Marx’s and Engels’s works from May 1846 until March 1848 in I/6 (1932), Engels’s works from 1844 until July 1846 (1932), The Holy Family and Marx’s writings from 1844–5 in I/3 (1932)], and one volume from the third section [Marx–Engels correspondence between 1868 and 1883 in III/4 (1931)], which were published after Riazanov’s removal from the institute, and his replacement by V. Adoratskii (pp. xx–xi).

In: Kaan Kangal, “A Marxist Utopian Between East and West: Karl Schmückle. A Review of Begegnungen mit Don Quijote. Ausgewählte Schriften by Karl Schmückle.” [link]

[Note: previously published in the reprinting of Engels’ Feuerbach in 1888. Thanks to Paul Werner for the comradely correction!]

John McCole, Seyla Benhabib, and Wolfgang Bonß: “During the late 1920s Horkheimer lectured regularly on the history of philosophy, steadily expanding the scope of his work, and he began to move beyond formal and idealist paradigms by reading the history of philosophy in terms of a Marxian model of historical materialism adopted from The German Ideology.“ From: “Introduction. Max Horkheimer: Between Philosophy and Social Science.” In: On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. Edited by Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonß, and John McCole. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 5.

For a conceptual reconstruction of the historical-materialist approach of these lectures, see John Abromeit’s account of “Horkheimer’s Materialist Interpretation of the History of Modern Philosophy.” in: Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 90-140.

Alfred Schmidt has developed this connection to The German Ideology most extensively, both in editorial work and in monographs, such as: Die Kritische Theorie als Geschichtsphilosophie (Carl Hanser Verlag, 1976).

As Christian Voller has recently demonstrated, even under self-imposed censorship protocols, the description of a “rationally organized society” which constitutes the normative horizon of the most circumspect early critical theorists—Adorno and Horkheimer in particular—is drawn almost verbatim from a single passage in Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology:

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all naturally evolved premises as the creations of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Vol. 5 of Collected Works. (Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 81.]

Christian Voller, In der Dämmerung. Studien zu Vor- und Frühgeschichte der Kritische Theorie (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2023), 61-63.

In: Friedrich Pollock (2024), 87.

Marx-Engels Archiv. Zeitschrift des Marx-Engels-Instituts in Moskau. Edited by D. Rjazanov. I. Band. (J.B. Hirschfeld [Arno Pries], Leipzig; 1926). Marx-Engels-Verlags-Gesellschaft.

Marx-Engels Archiv. Zeitschrift des Marx-Engels-Instituts in Moskau. Edited by D. Rjazanov. II. Band. (J.B. Hirschfeld [Arno Pries], Leipzig; 1927). Marx-Engels-Verlags-Gesellschaft.

Paul Werner

May 16

I trust you're not suggesting the Feuerbach Theses were first published in 1926. They were included in the book reprint of Engels' "Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie" in 1888.

In Comradeship,

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