Georges Politzer - Biography

Biography

Politzer was already a militant by the time of his involvement in the Hungarian insurrection of 1919. He went into exile at age seventeen following the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic led by Béla Kun when the country fell under the rule of the repressive government of Austro-Hungarian Admiral Miklós Horthy.

He settled in Paris in 1921 after meeting Freud and Sándor Ferenczi in Vienna. He joined the French Communist Party sometime between 1929 and 1931.

At the beginning of the 1930s, the Communist Party founded the Workers University of Paris (l'Université Ouvrière de Paris) which lasted until dissolution by German occupation in 1939. During his tenure at the university, Politzer was entrusted with and given charge of a course on dialectical materialism.

A disciple of Marx and Lenin, Politzer was very interested in psychology, preaching the concrete aspects of this field, in relation to which he qualified traditional psychology as abstract. He also took a lively interest in nascent Freudian theory and its uses before eventually distancing himself from it. In this same period, he occupied the post of professor of philosophy at Lycée Marcelin Berthelot in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés.

Mobilized to Paris in 1940, he remained on the side of the French Communist Party secret command. Demobilized in July 1940, he oversaw the edition of a clandestine bulletin.

After his comrade and friend Paul Langevin, a physicist of world renown, was arrested in October 1940, Politzer published the first edition of The Free University (L'Université Libre), which told of the imprisonment of scholars and denounced the extortions committed by invading fascists during World War II.

In February 1942, Politzer's operations were stopped; he was arrested along with his wife Mai (also a Communist and a Resister) for violating the law banning the Communist Party. He underwent torture, being turned over to the Nazis on 20 March 1942 and undergoing execution by firing squad at their hands on 23 May of that year, just after having secretly published a French academic journal. His wife was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in March 1943.