Karl August Wittfogel

Karl August Wittfogel (6 September 1896, in Woltersdorf, Germany – 25 May 1988, in New York, United States) was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. Originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, after the Second World War Wittfogel was an equally fierce anti-communist.

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. Wittfogel was always 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.

In 1921 Wittfogel married Rose Schlesinger. Wittfogel's second wife was the sociologist Olga (Joffe) Lang, a Russian sociologist who traveled with him to China and collaborated with him on a project to analyze the Chinese family. Lang later published a monograph on the Chinese family and a biography of the anarchist writer, Ba Jin. 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.

In the early 1920s, Wittfogel wrote a number of communist, but also somewhat expressionistic, plays: "The Cripple", performed with other short plays on October 14, 1920 at Erwin Piscator's Berlin Proletarian Theatre, and "Red Soldiers", "The Man Who Has an Idea", "The Mother", "The Refugee", "The Skyscraper" and "Who is the Biggest Fool?", all of which were published by Malik. Wittfogel declined an offer to become the dramatic producer of the revolutionary Volksbühne (People's Stage) in Berlin, because he wanted to concentrate on his academic studies. He published some long Hegelian essays on aesthetics and literature in Die Linkskurve, journal of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, and was a member of its editorial staff from April 1930.

Wittfogel is best known for his monumental work Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, first published in 1957. Starting from a Marxist analysis of the ideas of Max Weber on China and India's "hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" and building on Marx's sceptical view of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Wittfogel came up with an analysis of Oriental despotism which emphasized the role of irrigation works, the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them and the impact that these had on society, coining the term "hydraulic empire" to describe the system. In his view, many societies, mainly in Asia, relied heavily on the building of large-scale irrigation works. To do this, the state had to organize forced labor from the population at large. As only a centralized administration could organize the building and maintenance of large-scale systems of irrigation, the need for such systems made bureaucratic despotism inevitable in Oriental lands. This structure was uniquely placed to also crush civil society and any other force capable of mobilizing against the state. Such a state would inevitably be despotic, powerful, stable and wealthy. Wittfogel believed this hydraulic hypothesis applied to Russia under the Soviet Union.

The sinologist Frederick W. Mote, however, strongly disagreed with Wittfogel's analysis, but others, such as Barrington Moore, George Lichtheim and especially Pierre Vidal-Naquet are among those who found the thesis stimulating. F. Tökei, Gianni Sofri, Maurice Godelier and Wittfogel's estranged pupil Lawrence Krader, then Maoist F. Kramer or Claus Leggewie/Helmut Raich concentrated on the concept. Two Berlin leaders of the SDS student movement, Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, have published on these themes. Then East German dissident Rudolf Bahro later said that his Alternative in Eastern Europe was based on ideas of Wittfogel, but because of the latter's later anti-communism, Wittfogel could not be mentioned by name. Bahro's later ecological ideas, recounted in From Red to Green and elsewhere were likewise inspired by Wittfogel's geographical determinism.

The Hydraulic Society thesis was also taken up by ecological anthropologists such as Marvin Harris. Further applications of the thesis included that to Mayan society, when aerial photographs revealed the network of canals in the Mayan areas of Yucatan. Critics have denied that Ceylon or Bali are truly hydraulic in the Wittfogel sense.

• Vom Urkommunismus bis zur proletarischen Revolution, Eine Skizze der Entwicklung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, 1. Teil: Urkommunismus und Feudalismus, Verlag Junge Garde, Berlin C 2, 1922, 79 p.
• Die Wissenschaft der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Eine marxistische Untersuchung, Malik, Berlin, 1922
• Geschichte der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Von ihren Anfängen bis zur Schwelle der großen Revolution, Malik, Wien, 1924
• Das erwachende China, Ein Abriß der Geschichte und der gegenwärtigen Probleme Chinas, AGIS Verlag, Wien, 1926
• Shanghai- Kanton, Vereinigung Internationale Verlags-Anstalten, Berlin, 1927
• Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, Versuch der wissenschaftlichen Analyse einer großen asiatischen Agrargesellschaft, Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1931, XXIV, 767 P. (=Schriften des Instituts für Sozialforschung der Universität Frankfurt am Main, No. 3)
• Die natürlichen Ursachen der Wirtschaftsgeschichte, in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 67, 1932, pp. 466–492, 597-609, 711-731.
• Die Theorie der orientalischen Gesellschaft, in: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. 7, No. 1/2, Alcan, Paris, 1938

• Rare with little known John Heartfield cover. The first part is all there is. The Verlag Junge Garde, Berlin C 2 (on Stralauerstrasse 12 in Schöneberg) was the publishers of the Communist Youth International, Kommunistische Jugendinternationale.
• In Brussels, February, 1927 the Komintern Liga gegen Imperialismus was founded at a Internationale Kongress gegen Unterdrückung und Kolonialismus. This Congress had been organised by Willi Münzenberg). Wittfogel took part, as did Agnes Smedley. (Source: Sinologie Heidelberg Alumni Netzwerk

• “Conversations with Wittfogel”. Telos 43 (Spring 1980). Telos Press, New York.

Plays

• Julius Haidvogel (= K. A. Wittfogel), Der Krüppel (The Cripple). in: Der Gegner, Vol. 2, Nr. 4, Malik, Berlin, 1920, p. 94ff..
• Rote Soldaten. Politische Tragödie in fünf Akten (Red Soldiers), Malik, Berlin, 1921
• Der Mann der eine Idee hat. Erotisches Schauspiel in vier Akten (The Man Who Has an Idea), Malik, Berlin, 1922, and 1933
• Die Mutter - Der Flüchtling. Zwei Einakter (The Mother & The Refugee, 2 one-act plays, Malik, Berlin, 1922
• Wer ist der Dümmste? Eine Frage an das Schicksal in einem Vorspiel und vier Akten. (Who is the Biggest Fool?), Malik, Berlin, 1923
  • Gustav von Wangenheim, Da liegt der Hund begraben und andere Stücke, Aus dem Repertoire der Truppe 31, Rowohlt, Reinbek b. Hamburg, 1974
• Der Wolkenkratzer. Amerikanischer Sketch (The Skyscraper), Malik, 1924

• Der Krüppel was performed on October 14, 1920 at Piscator's Proletarischem Theater - Bühnen der revolutionären Arbeiter Groß- Berlins, together with two other short plays under the heading Gegen den weißen Schrecken - für Sowjetrußland, see: Der Gegner. Mit dem satirischen Teil Die Pleite, vol. 2, no. 4, Malik, Berlin, 1920, p. 94- 107. Erwin Piscator's essay Über Grundlagen und Aufgaben des Proletarischen Theaters in the same number on pages 90 to 93. Der Gegner was then edited by Julian Gumperz and Wieland Herzfelde. Rote Soldaten had been scheduled for a second season of the theatre.

Wittfogel also published a theoretical essay on proletarian theatre: Grenzen und Aufgaben der revolutionären Bühnenkunst, Der Gegner, vol. 3, no. 2, Berlin, 1922, p. 39-44.

On the Weimar Proletarian Theatre: Richard Weber, Proletarisches Theater und Revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung, 2nd. ed., Prometh, Cologne, 1978, P. 85, 96.

One of the final communist Weimar theatre events was Berthold Brecht's "didactic play" on communism, murder and morality, set in China, Die Maßnahme. Wittfogel's review was published in Die Welt am Abend, on Dec. 22, 1930.

• The Foundations and Stages of Chinese Economic History, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Alcan, Paris, 4, 1935, p. 26-60.
• New Light on Chinese Society; An Investigation of China's Socio-Economic Structure, Institute of Pacific Relations, New York, 1938
• The Society of Prehistoric China, Alcan, Paris, 1939
• Meteorological Records from the Divination Inscriptions of Shang, American Geographical Society (1940)
• Public Office in the Liao Dynasty and the Chinese Examination System ..., Harvard-Yenching Institute (1947)
• With Feng Chia-sheng et al., History of Chinese Society, Liao, 907-1125, American Philosophical Society, Transactions. Distributed by the Macmillan Co., New York, 1949. Google Book
  • With Chia-shêng Fêng and Karl H. Menges, History of Chinese society : Liao (907-1125). Appendix V, Qara-Khitay 1949
• Russia and Asia : Problems of Contemporary Area Studies and International Relations, 1950
• Asia's Freedom...and the Land Question 1950
• The influence of Leninism-Stalinism on China, 1951?
• The Review of Politics : The Historical Position of Communist China: Doctrine and Reality, University of Notre Dame Press (1954)
• Mao Tse-tung, Liberator or Destroyer of the Chinese Peasants?, Free Trade Union Committee, American Federation of Labor, New York, 1955
• The Hydraulic Civilizations Chicago, 1956
• Oriental Despotism; a Comparative Study of Total Power Yale University Press, 1957
• Chinese Society : An Historical Survey, 1957
• The New Men, Hong Kong, 1958?
• Food and Society in China and India, New York, 1959
• Peking's "Independence (1959)
• The Marxist View of Russian Society and Revolution, 1960
• Viewer's Guide to From Marx to Mao, University of Washington (1960)
• The Legend of Maoism, 1960?
• Class Structure and Total Power in Oriental Despotism, 1960
• A Stronger Oriental Despotism 1960
• The Russian and Chinese Revolutions : A Socio-Historical Comparison 1961
• The Marxist View of China China Quarterly, 1962
• Agrarian Problems and the Moscow-Peking Axis, 1962
• A Short History of Chinese Communism, University of Washington, 1964
• The Chinese Red Guards and the "Lin Piao Line, American-Asian Educational Exchange, Inc. (1967)
• Results and Problems of the Study of Oriental Despotism 1969
• Agriculture: a Key to the Understanding of Chinese Society, Past and Present, Australian National University Press, 1970
• Communist and Non-Communist Agrarian Systems, with Special Reference to the U.S.S.R. and Communist China, a Comparative Approach Univ. of Washington Press, Seattle, 1971
• The Hydraulic Approach to Pre-spanish Mesoamerica, Austin, 1972
• Some Remarks on Mao's Handling of Concepts and Problems of Dialectics, University of Washington. Far Eastern and Russian Institute, not dated

On Wittfogel

• G. L. Ulmen, The Science of Society, Towards an Understanding of the Life and Work of Karl August Wittfogel, Mouton, The Hague, 1978
• G. L. Ulmen, ed., Society and History, Essays in Honor of Karl August Wittfogel, Mouton, The Hague, 1978, ISBN 90-279-7776-3
• "Karl A. Wittfogel," George Taylor, International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, 18 (London: Collier, 1979), p. 812.

Papers

• Papers, 1939-1970 Collected papers of Karl August Wittfogel (1939-1970) University of Washington Libraries
• Register of Karl Wittfogel Papers Hoover Institution