Jan Petersen (writer)
Jan Petersen was a German writer who was a member of the Communist Party of Germany, a leader of the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors, and a participant in the German resistance to Nazism who recorded daily life during the Gleichschaltung.
Biography
Early years
Petersen was born Hans Otto Schwalm to a working-class family in Berlin, Germany. As a teenage boy, he started working as a skilled labourer, and became a member of the Young Communist League of Germany before joining the KPD.Nazi Germany and
In 1928 the KPD established the BPRS and Petersen took the role of its leading the organisation in Berlin. With the Nazi party's takeover of the German state in the early 1930's, Petersen began to clandestinely record the Gleichschaltung as it happened in his Kiez. This became the manuscript for the book Our Street which was written over the course of 1933-4. Petersen typed the majority of the book in a room he rented in Charlottenburg, while other sections were produced in Oranienburg. In total, he made three copies of the manuscript.Our Street is an account of the Kiez around the Wallstraẞe, which was a working-class street and communist stronghold in Charlottenburg, novelised in order to protect its protagonist's identities. The memoir was written in the style of contemporary German Marxist street fighting novels. In 1934 Petersen smuggled a copy of the manuscript out of Germany by baking it inside a cake and transporting it across the Czechoslovak border.