Georges Politzer

Georges Politzer (1903 to 1942) was a Hungarian-born French philosopher and Marxist theoretician, sometimes called the red-headed philosopher. Born into a Jewish family in Nagyvarad, he joined the Hungarian Communist Party as a teenager, supported the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic and fled to France after its fall, becoming a French citizen in 1924. He met Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi in Vienna, which began a lifelong interest in psychology, and earned a certification to teach philosophy at the Sorbonne. He published books on philosophy and psychology, helped found journals including Revue de psychologie concrete, and from 1929 belonged to the French Communist Party, for which he taught dialectical materialism at the Workers' University of Paris and led the economic commission of the central committee. A member of the Resistance during the German occupation, he was arrested and shot by a Nazi firing squad at Fort Mont-Valerien in 1942.