Before the rise of the Nazis, Germany — with its powerful workers’ movement and mass social democratic and communist parties — was home to a flourishing Marxist intellectual landscape. Marxist evening schools, party magazines, and scholarly journals fed a vibrant culture of debate that, while primarily the domain of intellectuals, far surpassed any left-wing milieu since then in both quantity and quality.

After 1945, Marxism was officially canonized as “Marxism-Leninism” in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East, while in West Germany it was banished during the 1950s and survived only on the fringes of society. Marxism held on only in the form of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and a handful of Marxist intellectuals scattered across the country. One of those intellectuals was Leo Kofler (1907–1995), an important but unfortunately often overlooked intellectual pioneer of the postwar German left.

While Ernst Bloch once praised his work as a direct successor to György Lukács’s pathbreaking classic, History and Class Consciousness, Leo Kofler generally had little luck with the more than thirty books and pamphlets published during his lifetime. For example, the mythical year 1968 was almost over by the time his manifesto, Perspektiven des revolutionären Humanismus (Perspectives of Revolutionary Humanism), was published by the renowned Hamburg publisher Rowohlt. Yet the West German extraparliamentary opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition, APO), then at its height, apparently had little use for his political and theoretical pamphlet, since practically no one referenced it or discussed it extensively after its publication.