Edwin Hoernle

Edwin Hoernle (11 December 1883 – 21 July 1952) was a German politician (KPD), author, agronomist and a Marxist theoretician. He spent the Nazi period in Moscow where, during the final years of the Second World War, he was a founding member in July 1943 of the Soviet-backed National Committee for a Free Germany ("Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland" / NKFD). Edwin Hoernle was born in Cannstatt, a rapidly industrialising suburb on the northern edge of Stuttgart. Hermann Hoernle, his father, was a Christian missionary who later became a rural parson. He was one of his parents' four recorded children. Because of his father's calling, Edwin Hoernle spent the earlier years of his childhood, till 1889, in the East Indies. His mother, Marie, was the daughter of an organ builder. At the age of ten, by now growing up in the village of Beimbach back in Württemberg, he was already writing poems and beginning to distance himself ideologically from the Protestant piety of his parents. Hoernle was schooled privately between 1890 and 1896. He then attended secondary schools in Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart, successfully completing his school final exams (Abitur) in 1902. He performed his military service with an infantry regiment in 1903. He studied Theology, Philosophy and History at Tübingen and Berlin between 1904 and 1909. It was in Berlin that he came into contact with the Social Democratic Party, which for many in the German political establishment was still not accepted as a "mainstream" political party. He also met Helene Heß (1886–1956), who later became his first wife. Their son Alfred wan born in 1906. At this stage, however, they moved in together without the benefit of any marriage certificate, a development which triggered family hostility. In 1909 the couple married and Edwin passed his "Theological service exam", taking work as a church vicar. Three months later he broke with his family, quit the church and, early in 1910, joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD).