The education of an antifascist intelligence worker
Ten years before Hitler came to power, university student Hugo B- was examining the changing nature of journalism.
Author’s note: I’m taking a (very) few liberties with my translations of Hugo B-’s writing and speaking (in recorded interviews). -ts
FOUR YEARS after the turbulent end of World War I and the aborted 1919 German Revolution, Hugo B- was back to his studies at the university, eager to pursue his research in newspaper- and magazine journalism. Almost from the start, however, Hugo’s professors disappointed him. No one seemed to be moved by German journalism in the same ways that Hugo was.
“It’s astonishing how academics have allowed the press to go unnoticed for so long,” he lamented in one essay. “Consider all the different ways that our social- and industrial institutions are linked to the modern newspaper — a marvel of industrial organization by its capitalist managers! Consider, after all, the daily decision-making regarding divisions of labor, industrial technology, not to mention marshaling labor and matériel into products of public intellectual- and economic communication….”
‘Consider all the different ways that our social- and industrial institutions are linked to the newspaper! What other industry involves daily use of the railroad, the post office, the telegraph and the telephone?’
News-reporting and the entire work of the press, he said, “is a totally integrated industrial process…. What other industry involves daily use of the railroad, the post office, the telegraph and the telephone?”
Hugo B would be well-served by his education and alliances of the 1920s. Germany also would benefit from his work as a well-read industrial executive during the war — but one who also was an effective spy for the Allies, both the Soviet Union and the West, against the Nazi regime.