Flakin N. Martin Monath. A Jewish Resistance Fighter Among Nazi Soldiers

Pluto Press, 2018. — 209 p.From Preface:...I will never write a book again. This whole process was just exhausting. It was no fun.Fortunately, with Martin Monath I found a subject who kept me enthusiastic for several years. More than that: I fell in love. There is no academic distance here – I’m an avowed “Monte” fanboy. It is a bit embarrassing to admit how often I clapped with joy while typing on my laptop in a café, or how often I started crying while scribbling in my notebook on the subway.Why did I fall in love with Viktor, the man of many pseudonyms? Of course I was impressed when I first heard of him: A Jewish Berliner built communist cells in the Nazi army? I have shared hisTrotskyist convictions since I was young. But I also find Viktor fascinating because he seems like the exact opposite of me. Viktor always put on a brave face to motivate those around him – I, in contrast, feel compelled to share my neurotic fears. I’m doing it again right now!
This book started as an attempt to make an annotated reprint of the newspaper Arbeiter und Soldat. A French translation had appeared in 1978, an English one in 2008, and a partial Spanish one in 2016 – but the original text in German had not been available until I published it last year. For this project, I intended to write a very short introduc-tion about the newspaper’s editor. Quickly I discovered that all the available biographical texts offered different “real” names for Viktor – and none of these could be found in the Berlin archives...