Pavel Thalmann was born in the Swiss city of
Basel in 1901. As a young man, he came under the influence of the
Swiss anarchist Fritz Brupbacher and joined the
Communist Party of Switzerland (KPS) in 1921. From its founding, Thalmann served as general secretary of the Swiss communist youth, and as a functionary for the
Communist International. In 1922, he was delegated to attend a congress of the
Young Communist International in Moscow, where he first came under the influence of
Leon Trotsky. In 1925, Thalmann stepped down as secretary of the Swiss communist youth and enrolled in Moscow's
Higher Party School, where he studied alongside
Hermann Erb and
Ernst Illi. He graduated in 1928 and returned to Basel, where he became editor of the communist newspaper
Basler Vorwärts. He also met and married
Clara Ensner, a fellow Swiss communist. They became known as an exemplary "revolutionary couples", emphasising
gender equality between them. In 1929, Thalmann and Ensner were expelled from the KPS and subsequently joined the
Communist Party Opposition (KPS-O). In 1932, Thalmann became editor of its newspaper,
Arbeiter-Zeitung, which was published from
Schaffhausen. By this time, he was a himself a committed
Trotskyist. After the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War in July 1936, he joined Clara in
Revolutionary Catalonia. There Thalmann worked as a journalist, and joined the
Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). Thalmann then signed up to fight in the
Durruti Column, alongside
anarcho-syndicalists from Germany. During the
May Days, Thalmann and Ensner were imprisoned by the
Communist Party of Spain (PCE). Around this time, they had become acquainted with the anarchist
Friends of Durruti Group, which they later alleged to be under the influence of the Trotskyist Hans Freund (aka "Moulin"). Thalmann later alleged that some right-wing POUM activists
executed Trotskyist members of the party, although Clara claimed she had no knowledge of this happening. They soon fled to
France. During
World War II, Paul Thalmann participated in the
French Resistance, providing aid to German refugees in Paris. After the war, Thalmann and Ensner agitated for the
Soviet human rights movement and for
Algerian independence. In 1953, they moved to
Niça, where they opened a
guesthouse and worked together with student radicals during the
counterculture of the 1960s. During the 1970s, the couple published their memoirs in the French and German languages, which became key
primary sources for histories of the Spanish Civil War. Their memoirs were more concerned with depicting the
political sectarianism of the
Trotskyist factions than the revolutionary activities of the POUM. Pavel Thalmann died in 1980. == Selected works==