Wolfgang Duncker

His mother, Käte Duncker (1871–1953) was also active in education and politics over many years in, successively, imperial Germany, Weimar Germany, New York City and the German Democratic Republic.

Hermann Duncker (1874–1960), his father, was a trades union activist who later became a founder member of the Communist Party and later still became a professor and dean of faculty at the University of Rostock.

Wolfgang Duncker (5 February 1909 – 20 November 1942) was a German film critic and journalist.

Wolfgang attended school in Berlin and then Copenhagen between 1915 and 1919.

His mother fled to Denmark after the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, but after the most intense phase of the socio-political revolution and economic collapse that followed the war, Wolfgang attended school at Gotha between 1920 and 1923.

(His mother was a communist member of the Thüringian regional parliament (Landtag), based at nearby Weimar, at this time. ) Between September 1923 and September 1924 he took a year out from school in order to spend a "practical year [working] in agriculture" in Sweden where his parents had friends, and where his mother had previously spent half a year of political exile after her Danish work permit had lapsed, back in May 1919.

He then completed his schooling between 1925 and 1929 at the venerable Köllnisches Gymnasium (secondary school) in the Berlin quarter of Neukölln.

Wolfgang Duncker's elder brother, Karl Duncker, reacted against his parents' political passions and grew up to embark on a (tragically short) career as a determinedly apolitical philosopher-psychologist.

Wolfgang, however, joined the Young Communists while still at school, probably in 1927.

In December 1928 he joined the "Sozialistische Schülerbundes" (loosely, "Socialist school students' association") and during 1929 he joined the Communist Party itself.

The son of political activist parents, in 1929 he himself joined the Communist Party.

In May 1929 he enrolled at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelm University (as the Humboldt was known before 1949), though it is not clear that he ever completed a degree course there.

A few months after joining the Communist Party he was employed by the left-leaning "Berlin am Morgen" (Munzenberg-owned newspaper) to edit the "Entertainment supplement" ("Unterhaltungsbeilage").

Along with the editorial duties, between the end of 1929 and the start of 1933 he contributed several hundred articles of his own on films, stage plays and literature under the pseudonym "Mersus".

Early in 1931 Wolfgang Duncker went alone for a stay in Davos, hoping that the famously health-giving high valley air would improve the problems he was having with his lungs.

By this time Davos was not merely a health resort but also well established as a winter sports destination.

It was expensive and Duncker was unable to afford a hotel room with a mountain view.

A sympathetic hotel worker discreetly arranged for him to be smuggled into a more expensive room during the daytime, while the guest who was using it was safely out of the way on the ski slopes.

The superior room provided both a view over the mountains and a balcony on which he could sit and gorge himself on the fine mountain air.

Nemesis arrived in the form of the room's occupant when she unexpectedly returned early from the slopes and found a strange man sunbathing on her balcony.

She asked what he was doing there: surviving sources are silent as to his reply, but the two were married a few months later.

Erika Weiss was a couple of years older than the unexpected visitor in her Davos hotel room.

She was Swiss, from a respectable middle-class Basel family.

Her parents were not pleased to find themselves having to entrust their daughter's future happiness to a German communist.

For Erika the marriage to a foreigner also meant the automatic loss of her Swiss citizenship.

After the Hitler government took power at the start of 1933 he emigrated, ending up in Moscow from August 1935.

The Nazi Party took power at the start of 1933 and lost no time in transforming the country into a one-party dictatorship.

The communists were, like other political parties, banned: The authorities applied particular rigor to their persecution of those who were or had been members of the Communist Party.

The "Berlin am Morgen" (newspaper) was banned, which meant that Wolfgang Duncker found himself without a job and at the back of the queue for any other employment opportunities.

Towards the end of January 1933 Wolfgang and Erika relocated to Switzerland where they stayed in a (very) small town called Bachs (Zürich) with Erika's brother, a Protestant pastor.

They were not permitted to work, however, since Europe's economy was still reeling from the backwash of the Great Depression and the country's regulated labour market meant that only Swiss nationals were able to work.

Desperate to provide for himself and his wife Wolfgang Duncker nevertheless published an article in the left-leaning Basler Zeitung, published across the mountains the west of German-speaking Switzerland.

He received a fee of 20 francs.

The article was completely apolitical, but his defiance of the work ban nevertheless led to the Dunckers being expelled from the country.

He took Soviet citizenship in August 1937 or January 1938, but was arrested by the security services in March 1938 and accused of spying.

Sentencing followed on 8 June 1938.

He died "of exhaustion" at the Vorkutlag labour camp 2,500 km / 1,600 miles north-east of Moscow, slightly less than three years after his brother's suicide near New York City.

Wolfgang Duncker's Swiss-born widow stayed on, working in a Soviet tank factory, and able to leave the Soviet Union with her two surviving children only at the end of 1945.

She returned home to Basel in 1947.

Wolfgang Duncker was born in Stuttgart, the youngest of his parents' three recorded children.