Marguerite Kuczynski

Life

Marguerite Steinfeld was born in Bischheim, a small town just to the north of Strasbourg, and at that time part of Germany. When she was 14 the entire region was transferred to France. Steinfeld trained initially, to work as a teacher. By 1920 she was studying at the Brookings School in Washington DC where an early influence was the eminent statistician Ethelbert Stewart. It was also at the Brookings that she got to know Jürgen Kuczynski. They subsequently worked together and on 18 September 1928 they were married. In 1927 she had taken a position as a research assistant at the New York based, and then recently established National Bureau of Economic Research, but in summer 1929 the two of them returned to Europe and set up home together in Berlin.

In January 1933 the NSDAP (Nazi party) took power and lost little time in setting up a one party state in Germany. Membership of political parties (other than of the Nazi Party) became illegal, and the ban on political parties was enforced with particular effect in respect of (former) Communist Party members. During the next few years it would also become clear that the strident anti-Semitism which had featured in Nazi rhetoric during that party's years in opposition would be integrated into government policy. During 1933 many German communists were arrested and imprisoned, while others left the country to avoid the same fate. Sources indicate that as early as February/March 1933 the Kuczynskis discussed following other family members into emigration, but at this point they decided to stay in Germany and participate in anti-fascist resistance. Eventually, in January 1936, emigration could be put off no longer, however, and the couple moved to England.

In England the two of them continued their work as left-wing economists while also engaging in anti-Fascist work, some of it legal: some not. Marguerite published a number of articles on the labour market, wages and the position of workers, sometimes in collaboration with her husband. She also participated in anti-fascist immigrant organisations and, later in the decade, established a library for the English branch of the Free German League of Culture (Freier Deutscher Kulturbund). She remained in charge of the library till the couple returned to Berlin in 1946. Till 1942 she worked as secretary to the War Committee of German Woman Refugees (Kriegshilfskomitees deutscher Flüchtlingsfrauen). In 1943 she was elected to the executive committee of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. She gave lectures on the theme of Women's Resistance in Nazi Germany, and contributed an essay to a compilation-publication entitled "Women under the Swastika". She also organised numerous support actions and assisted with the visa applications of German refugees persecuted for reasons of politics or race.

War ended in May 1945, with Berlin now at the heart of the Soviet occupation zone in what remained of Germany. Several months after her husband, Marguerite Kuczynski returned to Berlin in March 1947, where the two of them initially lived in the house they had inhabited before the war, which was now in the city's US occupation zone: she took a position with the city administration and then, as the de facto political division of the city began to appear more permanent, and a few years later to be reflected in physical frontier-divisions, she took work with the Finance Ministry in the Soviet zone. Later, after the Soviet administered occupation zone had been re-invented, in October 1949, as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany), she worked in the East German Ministry for Overseas Trade ("Außenwirtschaftsministerium"). She gave up government work, however, contending that work there was "too amateurish" ("zu dilettantisch"). In any event, the real focus of power under constitutional arrangements ever more closely modeled on those of the Soviet Union lay not with government ministries but with the Central Committee of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), and her next position, from 1957, was as an academic researcher with the Central Committee's Institute for Marxism–Leninism. In 1960 she retired from the Institute as well, finding it "too dogmatic". In the meantime, her outstanding achievements as a researcher with the Institute for Marxism–Leninism included a new edition of Karls Marx's early work, The Poverty of Philosophy included in Volume 4 of the 43 volume "Marx-Engels-Werke" series produced by the East German Party Central Committee between 1956 and 1990. Her contribution to the new edition of The Poverty of Philosophy was much enhanced by her use of an early French language edition, discovered following intensive research in Japan, in which Marx himself had penned extensive margin notes.

Some of Marguerite Kuczynski most enduring contributions to scholarship, produced only after her "retirement" in 1960, were a series of translations into German, supported by her own extensive and scholarly commentaries, of works by François Quesnay (Physiocrat). Later, during the 1980s, she made a start on a similar set of translations of the work of economist-statesman Turgot, but this project remained unfinished because her eye-sight failed.

Personal

The Kuczynskis had three recorded children: Madeleine (1932), Peter (1937) and Thomas (1944). Of these, Thomas Kuczynski subsequently became notable as an economist and statistician, known in particular for his work on damages claims of victims of German wartime Forced labour policies. Rita Kuczynski, known in German speaking lands as a writer-philosopher (and more recently as a novelist) is a daughter-in-law of Marguerite Kuczynski.

Marguerite Kuczynski died in Berlin in January 1998, slightly more than five months after the death of her husband. 1998 was also the year in which Thomas Kuczynski's marriage to Rita ended in divorce, following some years of separation.