Name Laszlo Radvanyi | ||
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László Radványi, also known as Johann Lorenz Schmidt, was born into a Jewish family in Hungary, on December 13, 1900, and died July 3, 1978.
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Radványi as a boy attended a gymnasium in Budapest on Marko Street, where he also authored at age 16 a book poetry, which received a preface from Frigyes Karinthy.
Radványi studied economics and philosophy in 1918-1919 at the University of Budapest, where he became involved in radical politics and with the destruction in 1919 of the Hungarian Soviet Republic fled to Vienna, Austria. He there adopted the pseudonym Johann Lorenz Schmidt from the 18th-century Protestant dissident theologian.
Radványi studied philosophy at Heidelberg University, in Germany, where he obtained his doctorate in 1923. Directed by Karl Jaspers, his thesis on Chiliasm was summa cum laude. While at Heidelberg, Radványi met the poet Anna Seghers, who was born Anna (Netty) Reiling in Mainz, Germany on November 19, 1900. Radványi and Seghers married in 1925 and had two children, Pierre (b. 1926), and Ruth (b. 1928).
After finishing their studies at Heidelberg, Radvanyi and Seghers moved to Berlin, where László directed the Marxistische Arbeiterschule (Marxist Workers School), from 1925 to 1933.
Radványi gathered faculty members such as Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht, and speakers such as Albert Einstein, who in 1931 offered a conference titled “What a worker must know about the Theory of Relativity”.
László indicated in his letters in 1926 the impossibility of obtaining a job as philosophy professor in Germany because of his “Hungarianess and Jewishness”.
The German government closed the Marxistische Arbeiterschule in 1933, and Radványi then left for Paris.
Radványi in Paris founded and directed the Freie Deutsche Hochschule (Free German University).
The German invasion of Paris forced Radványi to abandon his new endeavor.
In 1940, the Meudon police detained him as a citizen of a country allied with Germany.
In December 1940, Seghers obtained a visa for herself, her husband, and their children with the help of Karl Mannheim.
They did not leave France until March 24, 1941, after they received a transit visa from the U.S where they arrived on June 16, 1941 in New York. They departed June 25, 1941 aboard the SS Monterey.
The SS Borinquem's manifest of passengers also included the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and surrealistic writer André Breton for New York City, and the port of Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico.
Radványi and his family arrived in Mexico on June 30, 1941.
In Mexico City, the family had an audience in the National Palace with the new President, General Manuel Ávila Camacho.
Radványi got a job at a local newspaper.
Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the principal leader of the Mexican labor movement asked Radványi to join the recently created Universidad Obrera (Mexico's Workers University) and teach Marxist history and economics.
In 1944, Radványi took a position at the National University of Mexico.
Radványi left Mexico in 1952 for the German Democratic Republic to teach at Humboldt University.
In 1955, Radványi and his family moved to Volkswohlstraße 81 (later Anna-Seghers-Straße), in East Berlin.
On July 3, 1978 he died, and is buried with his wife in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery.
In 2007, Professor Radványi's archives were deposited, though not organized, at Humboldt University in Berlin.