Otto Braun (Li De) - Return To Germany and Later Years

Return To Germany and Later Years

Only after the death of Stalin was Otto Braun allowed to return to his homeland after nearly three decades of exile.

Following his arrival at the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) Braun became a fellow at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism maintained by the Central Committee of ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), as the Communist Party was officially called. His main responsibility was the publication in German of the writings of Vladimir Lenin.

He was First Secretary of the German Writers' Association from 1961 to 1963 – when he fell from grace. Already in his mid-sixties, he was for some time a pensioner doing some freelance translation from Russian.

His return to the authorities' good books was evident when in 1964 the ruling party's organ Neues Deutschland carried the revelation that the otherwise unknown Li De, involved in the Chinese Long March of the 1930s, had been in fact none other than the German Otto Braun.

This gave Braun the possibility and the impetus to write his Chinese Notes. As mentioned, researchers consider these as full of interesting information, particularly useful as offering a different angle to that of official Chinese Communist historiography – but in themselves far from objective or impartial. They were written in the late 1960s, when Braun was also a fellow of Institute for Social Sciences. The memoirs were published in book form at 1973 and translated to Chinese, English and other tongues.

Braun died at age 74, while on vacation in Varna, Bulgaria. He was buried in East Berlin, and his obituaries appeared in Pravda and in The New York Times.