Stampfer, Friedrich

(1874-1957)

   journalist and politician; editor of Vorwarts,* the SPD's flagship newspaper.* Born to a German-Jewish family in the Moravian capital of Brünn (now the Czech city of Brno), he was raised in the Habsburg Empire. He was already interested in socialism and journalism while in Gymnasium and began working for Leipzig's Volkszeitung, a socialist newspaper, while studying at the city s university. From 1903, after moving to Berlin,* he published a revisionist sheet, Stampfer-Korrespondenz, that urged a nonrevolutionary path to socialism. Following brief service with the Austrian army during the war, he returned to Berlin; when the Party leadership seized Vorwarts in November 1916 from its leftist editorial staff, he was appointed the paper s editor-in-chief, a post he held until 1933 (with Curt Geyer* from 1924). Maintaining a patriotic line in his own writing, he joined Germany s peace delegation in 1919. Although he resigned from Vorwarts in protest to the Ver-sailles Treaty,* he resumed his post after a one-year hiatus.

   Known in the Weimar era as the SPD's "grey eminence," Stampfer was elected to the Reichstag* in June 1920 and retained his mandate until May 1933. Part of his Party s right wing, he opposed reuniting with the small USPD in 1922, arguing that coalition would not work. Yet late in 1931 he began urging the SPD s executive (which he had entered in 1925) to form a loose anti-Nazi alliance with the KPD. Briefly arrested in February 1933, he emigrated to Prague in May and, with Geyer as editor, soon began publishing Neuer Vorwarts.In May 1938, upon moving to Paris, he joined the executive of the SPD-in-exile. Identified by the Gestapo as a leading Marxist-Communist, he made a dramatic escape to the United States in 1940. His history of the Weimar era, Die vierzehn Jahre der ersten Deutschen Republik (The fourteen years of the first German republic), published in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, in 1936, was released in Ger-many in 1947. He returned to West Germany in 1948.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Breitman, German Socialism; Matthias, "Downfall"; Schumacher, M.d.R.