Bernhard Reichenbach: Correspondence and papers

Bernhard Reichenbach: Correspondence and papers 

Bernhard Reichenbach, 1888-1975, was the son of a Jewish businessman and a protestant teacher. His childhood and schooling was in Hamburg. Later he became an actor in Bochum and Hamburg, 1912-1914. He studied literature, art history and sociology in Berlin. He was active in the youth movement and a member of the Freie Studentenschaft, Berlin. As a medical orderly in WWI he won the Ehren Kreuz II Klass. In 1917 he was a founding member of the Unabhängige Sozialistischepartei Deutschlands; co-founder of the Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, and, as a representative of the latter party, he attended the Executive Committee of the Communist International in Moscow, and the third World Congress of the Communist International. He left the KAPD on his return to Berlin and joined the SPD in the beginning of 1925. He continued his activities as a journalist for a number of left-wing periodicals whilst working as a company secretary for a weaving business in Krefeld. After the Nazis came to power he could no longer continue working as a journalist, and after pressure from the police he emigrated to Great Britain.