Ossip K. Flechtheim (1909-1998)

The political scientist Ossip Kurt Flechtheim (1909-1998) lived in different countries on both sides of the Atlantic: Germany, France, Switzerland, and the United States. He specialized in various fields of research: contemporary history, political science, and future studies, and he taught and wrote in several languages. Flechtheim belonged to three different parties of the left: before 1933 he was a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). After his return to Berlin in 1952 he had joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which he then left in 1962. From 1979 until his death Flechtheim was a member of the Alternative Liste that was part of the ecological Green Party. Flechtheim’s work, which includes nearly twenty books and a great number of edited volumes, is devoted to crucial problems of the twentieth and the twenty-first century: to war and peace, democracy and dictatorship, fascism and anti-fascism, the north-south conflict, and capitalism and Communism in its various forms. The last chapter of the volume gives a biographical overview and tries to explain how Flechtheim’s life’s path between Europe and America influenced his thinking as a versatile scholar and radical socialist.