Paul Lensch

Paul Lensch (31 March 1873, Potsdam, Province of Brandenburg - 18 November 1926) in Berlin). War journalist, editor, author of several books and a politician in SPD. From 1912, Lensch was a member of the German Reichstag for the SPD, in 1919 he became professor of economics at the Berlin University.

Already in high school Lensch studied Hegel and Marx. After military service he studied economics in Berlin and Strasbourg. In 1900 in Strasbourg he received his doctorate in political science. He then worked as an editor for the newspaper Freie Presse für Elsaß-Lothringen (Free Press for Alsace-Lorraine). From 1902 he was editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung and next to Rosa Luxemburg, Alexander Parvus, Franz Mehring and Karl Liebknecht he was spokesman for the Anti-revisionist Left in the SPD. From 1908 to 1913 he was editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung. In 1912 he was the SPD candidate for the Saxon 22nd constituency (Reichenbach) and was elected to the Reichstag. In 1914 Lensch first opposed the SPD’s approval of war loans, but in 1915, together with Heinrich Cunow and Konrad Haenisch, he formed the Lensch-Cunow Haenisch-group within the SPD, which sought to reach agreement with the majority of the SPD through a defense of the war based on Marxist theory. They developed the theory of war socialism that was published in the Hamburger Echo and other SPD newspapers. From mid-1915 Die Glocke, a magazine founded by Alexander Parvus became the organ of the group. In October 1917 the SPD split. Lensch became a spokesman for the mainstream SPD, called MSPD (Mehrheits-SPD, "majority-SPD"), which was under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert who had supported the war from the start. In November 1918 Lensch became an important contact between the Council of the People's Deputies and the military leadership. Later he withdrew from party politics and became a professor at the University of Berlin. Lensch was also a member of the foreign policy staff of the conservative Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper belonging to Hugo Stinnes, a famous industrialist and politician. In 1922, after the merger of MSPD and what was left of USPD (moving SPD to the left), Lensch was expelled from the party. From June 1922 to November 1925 he was editor of the DAZ Lensch, and increasingly became more and more closely associated with conservative opponents of Social Democracy. In November 1926 Lensch died after a long illness in Berlin.

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