Walter Kolbenhoff

German writer. Born as Walter Hoffmann May 20th 1908 in Berlin, died January 29th 1993 in Germering. Son of a worker. He became a worker himself and travelled as a vagabund through Europe, Turkey and northern Africa. In 19929 he joined the German communist party KPD living in Berlin, where he published his first novels in communist periodicals. The Hessischer Rundfunk produced a portrait of him in 1980, in which he spoke about his years in Berlin before Hitler came to power. Absolutely astonishing is, that he had to realize that the German communist party in the beginning thirties of the past century was willing to bring Hitler to power. This was said very unambiguosly in the periodical "Die Rote Fahne" of the KPD. It was told to Kolbenhoff and to his comrades, that Hitler would not remain in the government for long time and that a revolution of the working class in Germany would take place that would sweep him away and communist dictatorship would be the unavoidable consequence. Indeed in 1932 during a strike of the transport workers in Berlin the pickets were Rotfront (the communist partys organisation analogous to Hitlers SA) and SA-members side by side. This kind of action of the German communists can only be explained by a direct order of Josef Stalin to act so.

In 1933 he left Germany for Denmark, where he stayed until 1940 in his friends Wilhelm Reichs flat. 1933 in Denmark appeared his novel "Untermenschen" (Undermen) in which he depicted his former life as a vagabund.

As German troops invaded Denmark in 1940 Kolbenhoff got order from the communist party to go back to Germany and to join the Wehrmacht and to form a red cell. He obeyed to this order, became a soldier and took part in the battles in Yugoslavia and Italy. In 1944 he was made a prisoner of war by the American troops in the ruins of the Monte Cassino-monastery.

Works.

*"Untermenschen", Copenhague 1933
Heimkehr in die Fremde, 1949

*"Der Kopfjäger",1960, a novel about the man-hunt of the french foreign legion.
*"Das Wochenende", 1970. A novel about the German studentic movement in 1968.