Manes Sperber, a prominent novelist and philosopher who broke with the Communist Party in 1937 after being a member for 10 years and one of the first European intellectuals to expose the duplicity of Stalinism, died here Sunday at the age of 79.
Sperber, who was born in Zablotow, which he described as “a little Jewish town in Eastern Galicia,” was awarded a few months ago the Frankfurt Peace Prize for services rendered to better international understanding.
In 1940 he wrote, “The Burned Bramble,” the first of a trilogy, in which he traced the treacherous role played by the Communist Party in Germany which disarmed and atomized the working class and paved the way for the rise of Hitler to power.
He provided a masterful portrayal of how the Communist Party leaders, following the Comintern line of “first Hitler, then our turn,” prevented a united front with the Social Democrats and then, when Hitler assumed power, fled the country to the Soviet Union, leaving those workers they had organized helpless in the face of the Nazi onslaught.
Sperber left his native Poland in 1914 and settled in Vienna where he became a close associate of Alfred Adler, the psychologist, and taught psychology. Subsequently he became a professor of psychology at the University of Berlin. In 1934 he left Germany, after Hitler consolidated his power, and settled in Paris where he published most of his works.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
