Marguerite Kuczynski

Marguerite Kuczynski (born Marguerite Steinfeld: 5 December 1904 – 15 January 1998) was a European economist and literary scholar. She was born and died in Germany. Some of her most productive and (especially for English-language readers) best documented years were spent in England, where she also achieved some notability as a feminist campaigner.^[1]

Life

Marguerite Steinfeld was born in 1904

In England the two of them continued their work as left-wing economists while also engaging in anti-Fascist work, some of it legal: some not.[5] Marguerite published a number of articles on the labour market, wages and the position of workers, sometimes in collaboration with her husband.^[6] She also participated in anti-fascist immigrant organisations and, later in the decade, established a library for the English branch of the Free German League of Culture (Freier Deutscher Kulturbund).^[5] She directed the library until the couple returned to Berlin in 1946. Up until 1942, she worked as secretary to the War Committee of German Woman Refugees (Kriegshilfskomitees deutscher Flüchtlingsfrauen).^[5] In 1943 she was elected to the executive committee of the Women's Co-operative Guild.^[6] She gave lectures on the theme of Women's Resistance in Nazi Germany, and contributed an essay to a compilation-publication entitled "Women under the Swastika".^[7] She also organised numerous support actions and assisted with the visa applications of German refugees persecuted for reasons of politics or race.

In any event, the real focus of power in East Germany, modeled on constitutional arrangements of the Soviet Union, was not with government ministries but with the Central Committee of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands). From 1957 Kuczynski worked as an academic researcher with the Central Committee's Institute for Marxism–Leninism. In 1960 she retired from the Institute as well, finding it "too dogmatic". In the meantime, her outstanding achievements as a researcher with the Institute for Marxism–Leninism included a new edition of Karls Marx's early work, The Poverty of Philosophy, included in Volume 4 of the 43 volume "Marx-Engels-Werke" series produced by the East German Party Central Committee between 1956 and 1990.^[5] Her contribution to the new edition of The Poverty of Philosophy was much enhanced by her use of an early French language edition, discovered following intensive research in Japan, in which Marx himself had penned extensive margin notes.^[5]

Some of Marguerite Kuczynski's most enduring contributions to scholarship, produced only after her "retirement" in 1960, were a series of translations into German, supported by her own extensive and scholarly commentaries, of works by

The Kuczynskis had three recorded children: Madeleine (1932), Peter (1937) and Thomas (1944).[5] Of these, Thomas Kuczynski subsequently became notable as an economist and statistician, known in particular for his work on damages claims of victims of German wartime Forced labour policies. Rita Kuczynski, known in German-speaking lands as a writer-philosopher (and more recently as a novelist), is a daughter-in-law of Marguerite Kuczynski.

Marguerite Kuczynski died in Berlin in January 1998, slightly more than five months after the death of her husband.^[5] That year Thomas Kuczynski and his wife Rita divorced, following some years of separation.^[8]

References