Paul Frolich

Early years

Paul Frolich was born 7 August 1884 in Leipzig into a German working-class family. He was the second child of eleven. As a young man he studied history and social science at the Leipzig Workers' School.

Frolich joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1902.

Frolich's common-law wife from the 1920s was the communist Rosi Wolfstein (1888-1987). The pair were formally married in 1948.

Political career

Frolich worked as a journalist during the first decade of the 20th Century, writing for the Hamburger Echo from 1910 to 1914 and for the Bremer Burgerzeitung from 1914 to 1916.

From 1916 to 1918, Frolich and Johann Knief together edited a political weekly called Arbeitrpolitik (Worker's Politics) which emerged as the voice of revolutionary socialism in Bremen.

Frolich was a representative of the Bremen left-wing at the April 1916 Kienthal Conference, a gathering of international socialists held at Kienthal, Germany.

In 1918, Frolich founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) in Hamburg. This was later to become the official organ of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which Frolich helped to establish at the end of December 1918. During this period, Frolich sometimes wrote under the pseudonym "Paul Werner."

The founding congress of the KPD elected Frolich to its governing Central Committee. He was re-elected to this position by the 1920 Congress of the KPD, but at the end of the year he was squeezed off the body as a result of a merger of that organization with the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD).

Following the 1921 departure of a faction led by Paul Levi, Frolich rejoined the Central Committee of the KPD.

Frolich was a delegate of the KPD to the 3rd World Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow in the summer of 1921. Frolich was selected by the congress as the representative of the KPD to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI).

Frolich was elected as a Communist Party deputy to the Reichstag, serving in that capacity from 1921 to 1924 and again in 1928.

Frolich was expelled from the KPD in December 1928, ostensibly as a supporter of so-called "Right-wing" conciliation. Thereafter, he joined the Communist Party Opposition (KPD-O), and in 1932 helped to establish the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAP).

Imprisonment and emigration

Following the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Frolich was imprisoned, remaining in custody in a concentration camp in Lichtenberg until December of that year.

Following his release, Frolich emigrated to France, settling in Paris in February 1934.

Following the 1940 fall of France to the fascists, Frolich hurriedly emigrated again, this time to the United States, where he remained until after the conclusion of World War II.

Frolich returned to West Germany in 1950, where he spent the last years of his life.

Death and legacy

Paul Frolich died on 16 March 1953 in Frankfurt. He was 68 years old at the time of his death.

Frolich is best remembered as a pioneer biographer of the assassinated Communist Rosa Luxemburg. His book about her, first published in German in 1928, has been translated into a number of languages, including Spanish, English, French, Italian, Slovenian, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, and Japanese. A new edition of this work appeared in English in 2010, published by the radical Chicago publisher Haymarket Books.

Works