Karl August Wittfogel was born 6 September 1896 at
Woltersdorf, in
Lüchow,
Province of Hanover, to a Lutheran schoolteacher. 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. In 1921 Wittfogel married Rose Schlesinger. Wittfogel's second wife was
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. The anthropologist
Esther Schiff Goldfrank became Wittfogel's third 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. In his 1949
revisionist history of the
Liao dynasty (916–1125) he coined the term "
conquest dynasty" referring to a
Chinese dynasty established by non-
Han ethnicities in
China proper. He died of pneumonia on May 25, 1988, at
St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in
Manhattan.
Politics Before the
First World War, Wittfogel was the leader of the Lüneburg
Wandervogel group. In 1918, he set up the Lüneburg local. Many years later Wittfogel was to publish an account of these youth movements under the pseudonym "Jungmann" in
Max Horkheimer's compilation "Studies in Authority and the Family." He played a leading role in the Socialist Student Party after the
German Revolution. He worked alongside
Hans Reichenbach and ran an introductory course on "What is Socialism". He joined the
Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). At the
Meißnertag 1923, a large Youth Movement gathering, Wittfogel asked the members of the
Freideutsche Jugend whether they knew the need of the age, its big idea and whether they had what it takes to die for their convictions. After expelling the
Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) in the autumn of 1919, the KPD was significantly reduced in numbers, until a majority of USPD delegates decided to join it at their party convention in October 1920. Wittfogel was amongst the third of USPD members (ca. 300,000) who joined the 70,000-strong KPD.
Geraberg 1 May 1923):
Hede Massing,
Friedrich Pollock, Edward Alexander Ludwig, Konstantin Zetkin,
Georg Lukács,
Julian Gumperz,
Richard Sorge, Karl Alexander (child),
Felix Weil, unknown; sitting: Karl August Wittfogel, Rose Wittfogel, unknown, Christiane Sorge,
Karl Korsch,
Hedda Korsch, Käthe Weil, Margarete Lissauer, Bela Fogarasi,
Gertrud Alexander Wittfogel met
Karl Korsch in 1920 and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the
Institute for Social Research.
Felix Weil financed and
Richard Sorge organized this
Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche (1st marxist workweek) with
Karl Korsch and
Hedda Korsch,
Georg Lukács,
Béla Fogarasi, his later wife
Margarete Lissauer, Félix José Weil and
Käthe Weil (they were married 1921-1929), Richard and Christiane Sorge,
Friedrich Pollock,
Julian Gumperz and his later wife
Hede Massing, from 1919 to 1923 married to
Gerhart Eisler,
Konstantin Zetkin,
Fukumoto Kazuo,
Eduard Ludwig Alexander and
Gertrud Alexander, their child, and others.
Rose Wittfogel, born Schlesinger, also took part. They were married from 1921 (other sources say 1920) to 1929. She was a sculptor, later a librarian at the Frankfurt Institute. She emigrated to the Soviet Union and worked there (among other things?) as a translator at the VAGAAR, an Organisation for foreign workers. and from 1925 to 1933 was a member of the Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the
Frankfurter Universität in 1928, where his supervisors were
Wilhelm Gerloff,
Richard Wilhelm and
Franz Oppenheimer. His thesis was
On the Economical Importance of the Agrarian and Industrial Productive Forces in China, (
Die ökonomische Bedeutung der agrikolen und industriellen Produktivkräfte Chinas Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart. 1930, which became the first chapter of
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, 1931. Wittfogel was an active member of the German communist party and a vocal critic of its enemies. In a short 1974 notice to a reprint of his 1929 essay on Political Geography, Wittfogel says he came out much stronger against the Nazis than the KPD and
Komintern line wanted. Communist students at Jena invited him and
Alfred Bäumler for a debate on the importance of Hegel for the Germany of today. Bäumler was a specialist on Kant, Nietzsche and
Bachofen, who soon became a leading Nazi philosopher. When
Hitler came to power in 1933, Wittfogel tried to escape to Switzerland, but was arrested and interned in prisons and
concentration camps. His second wife
Olga Joffe Lang worked for his release and, with the help of right-wing revolutionary
Friedrich Hielscher, the also radical right-wing geographer
Karl Haushofer, and the
London School of Economics historian
R. H. Tawney, managed to get Wittfogel free in 1934. He left Germany for England and then the United States. Wittfogel's belief in the Soviet Union was destroyed with the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and he began to hate the totalitarian, "asiatic" nature of Soviet and
Chinese Communism from Lenin to Mao. He turned against his former comrades and denounced 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.
Playwrighting and aesthetics 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. Piscator himself played the Cripple at the opening.
John Heartfield managed a half-hour late delivery of the backdrop The
KPD newspaper
Die Rote Fahne published a harsh review of the plays, 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 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. His conservative aesthetics put Wittfogel on Lukacs' side—not what might have been expected from his plays. With the earlier
Dada and
Proletkult debates, the
Mehring-, documentary- and proletarian-literature feud, from 1928 on became part of the long and bitter debate on literary modernism and communism, which culminated in the 1930s onslaught on
Expressionism in the Moscow journal
Das Wort. The debate was rekindled in the 1960s as the
Brecht-Lukacs debate. At the time, Brecht had not really been able to publish his views. Wittfogel believed in the party at least until 1933 and still sometimes fiercely defended it until at least around 1939 (he broke with
Paul Massing over the
Ruth Fischer revelations), even in the 1920s Wittfogel had ideas of his own, e.g. on nature, which to him could never simply be a part of human history and pure object of thinking, an idea Lukacs did not like at all. With very few others he took Marx's idea of a genuine "asiatic" way of pre-capitalist development seriously. At a Leningrad conference in 1931, all those ideas of an "asiatic" "mode of production" were shot down and buried by the Stalinist majority. They resurfaced around 1960, but by then Wittfogel was of course a non-person in communist eyes.
Oriental Despotism 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 they had on society. He coined 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 so, 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 so-called Oriental lands. That structure was uniquely placed also to 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 the hydraulic hypothesis to apply to Russia under the Soviet Union. The sinologist
Frederick W. Mote, however, strongly disagreed with Wittfogel's analysis, as did
John K. Fairbank. Others, such as
Barrington Moore,
George Lichtheim and especially
Pierre Vidal-Naquet found the thesis stimulating.
F. Tökei,
Gianni Sofri,
Maurice Godelier and Wittfogel's estranged pupil
Lawrence Krader, 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
anticommunism, could not mention him 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 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. ==Selected works in German==