Karl August Wittfogel (6 September 1896 – 25 May 1988) was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. He was originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, but after the Second World War, he was an equally fierce anticommunist. Life and career Karl August Wittfogel was born 6 September 1896 at Woltersdorf, in Lüchow, Province of Hanover to a Lutheran schoolteacher. Wittfogel left school in 1914. He studied philosophy, history, sociology, geography at Leipzig University and also in Munich, Berlin and Rostock and in 1919 again in Berlin. From 1921 he studied sinology in Leipzig. In between Wittfogel was drafted into a Signal Corps Unit (Fernmeldeeinheit) in 1917. In 1921 Wittfogel married Rose Schlesinger. Wittfogel's second wife was Olga (Joffe) Lang, a Russian sociologist who traveled with him to China and collaborated with him on a project to analyze the Chinese family. Lang later published a monograph on the Chinese family and a biography of the anarchist writer, Ba Jin. The anthropologist Esther Schiff Goldfrank became Wittfogel's third wife in 1940. Wittfogel held academic positions at Columbia University from 1939 and was professor for Chinese history at the University of Washington from 1947 to 1966. He died of pneumonia on May 25, 1988 at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. Politics Before the First World War, Wittfogel was the leader of the Lüneburg Wandervogel group. In 1918, he set up the Lüneburg local. Many years later Wittfogel was to publish an account of these youth movements under the pseudonym "Jungmann" in Max Horkheimer's compilation "Studies in Authority and the Family." He played a leading role in the Socialist Student Party after the German Revolution. He worked alongside Hans Reichenbach and ran an introductory course on "What is Socialism". He joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). At the Meißnertag 1923, a large Youth Movement gathering, Wittfogel asked the members of the Freideutsche Jugend whether they knew the need of the age, its big idea and whether they had what it takes to die for their convictions. After expelling the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) in the autumn of 1919, the KPD was significantly reduced in numbers, until a majority of USPD delegates decided to join it at their party convention in October 1920. Wittfogel was amongst the third of USPD members (ca. 300,000) who joined the 70,000-strong KPD. Wittfogel met Karl Korsch