Frank Deppe is one of the most important Marxist intellectuals in Germany today. As a college student, he served on the national leadership of the Socialist German Student League (SDS), which was expelled from the Social Democracy Party (SPD) in 1961 and was subsequently an important figure in the 1968 movement.

In the decades that followed, he distinguished himself as the author of numerous Marxist studies of European integration, trade union strategy, and intellectual history, such as a five-volume history of twentieth-century political thought, or his groundbreaking study of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Since retiring from the University of Marburg in 2006, he has remained active as a member of Die Linke and on the editorial boards of two of Germany’s most important Marxist journals, Z. Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung and Sozialismus.

Deppe began his academic career in 1961 as a student at the University of Frankfurt, before moving to the University of Marburg three years later. Here, he received an intellectual socialization in the so-called “Marburg School,” a group of left-wing political scientists and sociologists around professor and antifascist resistance fighter Wolfgang Abendroth, who taught at the University of Marburg until 1972 — when Deppe took over his department chair. The students of Abendroth, and later of Deppe, developed an intellectual approach to Marxism that always sought to build and maintain ties with the organizations of the workers’ movement. For the Marburg School, it was clear that critical scholarship was never an end in itself. Rather, it had to be directed toward developing a better understanding of social conflicts and thereby helping to inform socialist strategy.