- Paul Massing
Paul Wilhelm Massing (
30 August 1902 –30 April 1979 ) was a Germansociologist .Biography
Born in
Grumbach in theRhine Province , he attended school inCologne , and later studied economics and social sciences at theFrankfurt School about the same time Franz Neumann was there. He graduated in 1926 as a political economist. A year later he studied for one term at the Sorbonne inParis and prepared his thesis on "agrarian conditions ofFrance in 19th century and the agrarian program of the French socialist parties". In 1928 he returned to the Frankfurt School and studied with Dr.W. Gerloff , attaining adoctorate .Afterwards Massing went to
Moscow , where he worked until 1931 at theInternational Agrarian Institute . When he returned to Germany, Massing was active from 1931 to 1933 with theCommunist Party of Germany (KPD) inBerlin . In 1933 Massing was arrested by the National Socialists under the Enabling Act. After five-month solitary confinement inOranienburg , Massing wrote his autobiographic novel "Schutzhäftling 880", published 1935 under his pseudonym Karl Billinger, dedicated to allcomrade s inconcentration camp s.After his release by an amnesty, he left Germany for Paris and then into the
United States . He returned again to Germany and continued work in theComintern underground. In the late 1930s he finally emigrated to the US and lived for a time with his wifeHede Massing in an old farmhouse Quakertown,Pennsylvania . He later marriedHerta Herzog .In the United States Massing continued writing about
Adolf Hitler , Nazism, andAnti-Semitism . In 1942 he took a job at the Institute of Social Research atColumbia University inNew York . Beginning in 1948 he taught political sociology for many years atRutgers University inNew Jersey .The probably most meaningful work of Massings is, "Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study Of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany", which appeared in 1949. Under the title "The Prehistory of Political Anti-Semitism", with a preface of
Max Horkheimer andTheodor Adorno , it appeared again in 1959. His wife's book "This Deception", was first released in 1951: it deals with the hardships they had to endure during their work first for the GRU but later theKGB .In 1977 Massing returned to his homeland and lived there for the remaining two years of his life, being buried in the family plot at Grumbach.
elected bibliography
*Paul Massing, "Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Antisemitism in Imperial Germany". (New York, 1949).
References
*Martin Jay, "The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950". Little Brown and Company, Canada. 1973. [http://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/jay/ch01.htm]
*Massing, Hede, "This Deception", New York, NY: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, (1951).
*Alexander Vassiliev, "Notes on Anatoly Gorsky’s December 1948 Memo on Compromised American Sources and Networks", 2003.External links
*Massing, Hede, Chapter 4:. [http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:7u1ekYrM8skJ:www.alexanderstreet4.com/cgi-bin/asp/imld/getdoc.pl%3F/projects/artfla/databases/asp/imld/fulltext/IMAGE/.5908%26sortorder%3Ddocsequence+Gaik+Ovakimian&hl=en&start=16 The Routine of an Underground Agent] , from "This Deception". New York, NY: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, (1951), pp. 335.
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