Biography
Karl August Wittfogel was born 6 September 1896 at Woltersdorf, in Lüchow, Province of Hanover. Wittfogel left school in 1914. He studied philosophy, history, sociology, geography at Leipzig University and also in Munich, Berlin and Rostock and in 1919 again in Berlin. From 1921 he studied sinology in Leipzig. In between Wittfogel was drafted into a Signal Corps Unit (Fernmeldeeinheit) in 1917
Before the First World War, he was the leader of the Lüneburg Wandervogel group. In 1918, he set up the Lüneburg local of the radical Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). In 1920, he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Wittfogel met Karl Korsch in 1920 and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the Institute for Social Research and from 1925 to 1933 was a member of the Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the Frankfurter Universität in 1928. All the time Wittfogel was an active and faithful member of the communist party and a vocal critic of all its enemies. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wittfogel tried to escape to Switzerland, but was arrested and interned in prisons and concentration camps. An international outcry led to his freedom in 1934.
He left Germany for England and then the United States. Wittfogel's belief in the Soviet Union was destroyed with the Hitler-Stalin alliance, and he began to hate the totalitarian, "asiatic" nature of Russian and Chinese Communism from Lenin to Mao. He turned against his former comrades and denounced some of them, as well as American scholars such as Owen Lattimore and Moses I. Finley, at the McCarran Committee hearings in 1951. He came to believe that the state-owned economies of the Soviet bloc inevitably led to despotic governments even more oppressive than those of "traditional Asia" and that those regimes were the greatest threat to the future of all mankind.
Anthropologist Esther Schiff Goldfrank became Wittfogel's wife in 1940. Wittfogel held academic positions at Columbia University from 1939 and was professor for Chinese history at the University of Washington from 1947 to 1966. He died on May 25, 1988.
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