Kostja Zetkin

Konstantin "Kostja" Zetkin
Kostja Zetkin with Rosa Luxemburg 1909
Born	14 April 1885 Paris, France
Died	September 1996 Halfmoon Bay, BC, Canada
Occupation(s)	physician political activist
Spouse	Gertrude Bardenhewer (1893-1981)
Children	Lucas Bennett (step son)
Parent(s)	Ossip Zetkin (1850-1889) Clara Eißner (1857-1933)

Konstantin "Kostja" Zetkin (14 April 1885 - September 1980) was a German physician, social economist and political activist.

He was the son of Clara Zetkin, an iconic pioneer of the political left in Germany. For a time, he became the lover of another, Rosa Luxemburg.

Life

Provenance and early years

Konstantin Zetkin, always identified as "Kostja" in family correspondence and in almost all other sources, was born in Paris. Kostja's father, Ossip Zetkin (1850-1889), was a Russian revolutionary and socialist who had suffered persecution on account of his involvement in the Narodniks movement and fled to Leipzig where, as a young man, he had supported himself as a carpenter and become active in student politics. That was how he met the trainee teacher, Clara Eißner (1857-1933). In the context of the recently enacted Anti-Socialist Laws Ossip Zetkin was arrested at a political meeting in 1880, identified as a "burdensome foreigner" ("lästiger Ausländer") and deprived of his Leipzig residence permit. He moved to Paris where, two years later, he was joined by Clara Eißner. The two had probably become lovers in Leipzig, and now they resumed their partnership. Clara adopted his family name, but the two of them never formally married. According to one source they could not marry because Ossip was unable to obtain the necessary papers from Russia: another version indicates that Clara was reluctant to enter into a marriage which would have caused her to lose her German citizenship. Their two sons, Maxim and Kostja, were born in 1883 and 1885.

Ossip Zetkin died from Tuberculosis at the start of 1889. In 1891 Clara Zetkin moved with her two boys back to Germany. Instead of returning to Saxony, where she had been born and grown up, she took her family to live in the west of the country, in Stuttgart, where she remained till the mid 1920s, and where Kostja and his elder brother grew up. At first the boys had difficulties with the German language, but they overcame any initial educational handicaps by the time they were old enough for secondary school. They both attended the well-regarded Karls-Gymnasium (secondary school) in Stuttgart, while their mother energetically pursued a political and journalistic career as an activist member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and as editor of Gleichheit, a bimonthly women's newspaper committed to gender equality.

Rosa Luxemburg and student years

It was presumably as a result of his mother's political activism that Kostja Zetkin met Rosa Luxemburg. He became the lover of his mother's friend in 1907, and this aspect of the relationship with Rosa Luxemburg lasted till his conscription in 1915. It was also at least partly on Luxemburg's recommendation that he studied Social Economics, while lodging in Berlin with Luxemburg. Social economics was the subject on which Luxemburg herself lectured at the SPD Party Academy. However, at some stage Kostja Zetkin switched to the study of Medicine (which was also the subject that his brother studied between 1902 and 1908).

War

War was declared in July 1914 and on 5 March 1915, before he had been able to complete his medical studies, Kostja Zetkin was conscripted into the army. He served as a medical officer on the Western Front, participating in the Battle of the Somme, at Verdun and, later, at Rheims. He continued as a medical officer through several promotions, and was awarded the Iron Cross (Class II) on 10 November 1916. After war ended in 1918 he resumed his medical studies, passing his state medical exams in 1923 with a distinction.

Mother and politics

During the years after 1923 his mother's health deteriorated progressively and he devoted a substantial part of his energy to looking after her and to supporting her political work. At one stage he described himself wryly as his mother's "technical worker" ("technischer Mitarbeiter"). His mother remained a prolific writer, and her letters disclose that during the 1920s and early 1930s Kostja Zetkin was living for a time with Nadja von Massov. (Rosa Luxemburg had been murdered early in 1919.) In 1923 Kostja Zetkin was a co-instigator, together with Karl Korsch, György Lukács and Richard Sorge, in founding the Institute for Social Research ("Institut für Sozialforschung" / IFS) at Frankfurt University. In connection with the IFS, he was also one of those who took part in the "First Marxist Work Week" conference held near Arnstadt for eight days towards the end of May 1923.

Nazi Germany

After several years that saw a widespread decline of faith in the political establishment, the Nazis took power in January 1933 and lost little time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Popular support for the Nazis rested on the the traditional populist pillars of Hope and Hatred. Jews and Communists were marked out as targets for state persecution, especially after the Reichstag fire in February 1933. Clara Zetkin was a high profile communist and Ossip Zetkin had been Jewish. It was time to leave. Kostja Zetkin and his mother moved to the Soviet Union, where Kostja's elder elder brother Maxim had been working as a physician since 1920. Clara Zetkin had already lived in Moscow and been looked after there by her elder son between 1924 and 1929.

Moscow

Clara Zetkin died on 20 June 1933 at Arkhangelskoye, a short distance outside Moscow. As a high profile communist, friend of Rosa Luxemburg and feminist activist over many decades, Clara Zetkin enjoyed a quasi-iconic status with Moscow power brokers, which now proved to be something of a mixed blessing. Kostja Zetkin found himself in disagreement with government representatives, apparently because of differing opinions concerning the selective publication of some of his late mother's large collection of articles, essays, letters and other politically relevant papers. Moscow's epidemic of political disappearances still lay in the future, but Zetkin evidently appreciated that disagreements with the authorities were unwinnable and that he himself was in danger as long as the situation persisted. He applied for permission to emigrate again, this time to Prague to work as a physician. The application was granted, not without some "bureaucratic reluctance", and in 1935 Kostja Zetkin moved to Czechoslovakia where he remained till 1938.

Gertrude Bardenhewer

In Czechoslovakia Kostya Zetkin and Gertrude Bardenhewer became lovers in 1935. Later they married. They were both qualified medical practitioners and there is speculation that they may originally have met as politically active medical students in Berlin. By 1935 Gertrude Bardenhewer had been a single mother for more than a decade. Keen to give birth to a child with artistic gifts she had teamed up with the artist-polymath Otto Tetjus Tügel, given birth to their son Lukas, and then gone on her way, taking the baby with her. By the late 1930s the boy was virtually grown up, and finding himself in London when war broke out in 1939 he joined the British army. A few years later he emigrated to the United States of America. German invasion of Czechoslovakia during 1938 and 1939 enforced further flight. Kostja and Gertrude, now together, made their way with difficulty to Paris.