On July 17, 1940, the communist and former Reichstag deputy Werner Scholem was shot dead. After a life that reflected the promises and tragedies of the German communist movement, he died at the hands of SS officer Johannes Blank in the quarry of Buchenwald concentration camp. He was mourned by his brother, Gershom Scholem, as well as by his friend Walter Benjamin.

In the years after World War I, Werner Scholem had been one of the most renowned figures in the German Communist Party (KPD). Yet his name would soon enter into obscurity. After robbing him of his freedom, in 1937 the Nazis robbed him even of his face: a bust of his head, created under duress, was shown in the antisemitic “The Eternal Jew” exhibition in Munich. A press photo from the exhibition is the last picture we have of Scholem.

After his murder, only a few family members and friends kept his memory alive. Given his communist politics, Scholem was not remembered or recognized in West Germany; but the German Democratic Republic in the East also ignored the memory of a militant it considered “ultraleft.” Only after 1990 did posterity remember this fascinating figure — one of the first German communists to warn against Stalinism.