in 1920 and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the Institute for Social Research. Felix Weil financed and Richard Sorge organized this Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche (1st marxist workweek) with Karl Korsch and Hedda Korsch, Georgy Lukacs, Béla Fogarasi, his later wife Margarete Lissauer, Félix José Weil and Käthe Weil (they were married 1921-1929), Richard and Christiane Sorge, Friedrich Pollock, Julian Gumperz and his later wife Hede Massing, from 1919 to 1923 married to Gerhart Eisler, Konstantin Zetkin, Fukumoto Kazuo, Eduard Ludwig Alexander and Gertrud Alexander, their child, and others. Rose Wittfogel, born Schlesinger, also took part. They were married from 1921 (other sources say 1920) to 1929. She was a sculptor, later a librarian at the Frankfurt Institute. She emigrated to the Soviet Union and worked there (among other things?) as a translator at the VAGAAR, an Organisation for foreign workers. and from 1925 to 1933 was a member of the Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the Frankfurter Universität in 1928, where his supervisors were Wilhelm Gerloff, Richard Wilhelm and Franz Oppenheimer. His thesis was On the Economical Importance of the Agrarian and Industrial Productive Forces in China, (Die ökonomische Bedeutung der agrikolen und industriellen Produktivkräfte Chinas Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart. 1930, which became the first chapter of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, 1931. Wittfogel was an active member of the German communist party and a vocal critic of its enemies. In a short 1974 notice to a reprint of his 1929 essay on Political Geography, Wittfogel says he came out much stronger against the Nazis than the KPD and Komintern line wanted. Communist students at Jena invited him and Alfred Bäumler for a debate on the importance of Hegel for the Germany of today. Bäumler was a specialist on Kant, Nietzsche and Bachofen, who soon became a leading Nazi philosopher. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wittfogel tried to escape to Switzerland, but was arrested and interned in prisons and concentration camps. His second wife Olga Joffe Lang worked for his release and, with the help of right-wing revolutionary Friedrich Hielscher, the also radical right-wing geographer Karl Haushofer, and the London School of Economics historian R. H. Tawney, managed to get Wittfogel free in 1934. He left Germany for England and then the United States. Wittfogel's belief in the Soviet Union was destroyed with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and he began to hate the totalitarian, "asiatic" nature