Heinrich Cunow

Heinrich Cunow (1862 to 1936) was a German Social Democratic Party politician and prominent Marxist theorist, born in Schwerin. Opposed to the First World War at first, he changed his view in 1915 and joined the Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch group, arguing that German imperialism was progressive and defending self-determination only for nations of a higher and democratic culture, a stand that Karl Kautsky opposed. When Kautsky left to join the Independent Social Democrats in 1917 Cunow took over the party theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit and edited it until 1923, and in 1919 he became an associate professor of social sciences and economic history in Berlin. His writing ranged from the prehistory of marriage and family and the origin of religion to Marxist sociology and the culture of the Inca Empire. The Nazis burned his writings in 1933, and he died impoverished in Berlin in 1936.