The history of German Marxism is usually understood as the history of two conflicting intellectual traditions: on the one hand the official state Marxism of the German Democratic Republic, and on the other hand the heterodox theories of the Frankfurt school, led by figures such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, who were as much a part of the literary as the political avant-garde of their times. As with most binaries, this obscures more than it clarifies. The life and work of the German political economist Fritz Sternberg — who lived through the Nazi terror and witnessed the Cold War — do not fit comfortably in either camp.

Sternberg was born in June 1895 to an educated and bourgeois German-Jewish family in Wrocław, a now Polish city then in East Prussia. A precocious adolescent, he devoured the classical socialist literature of his time and began to write his first articles for the Social Democratic Party’s press before turning sixteen. In 1911, he came under the lasting and personal influence of the Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber, and even before World War I, Sternberg was engaged in the socialist-Zionist youth movement in Wrocław — at the time one of the strongholds of both Zionist organizing and the radical socialist workers’ movement.