Karl Otto Paetel


Karl Otto Paetel was a German political journalist. During the 1920s, he was a prominent exponent of National Bolshevism. During the 1930s, he became a member of the anti-Nazi German resistance.

Biography

Paetel was born on 23 November 1906 in Berlin. He attended the Siemens-Oberrealschule where he got involved in the youth group. He later studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin.
Paetel was involved in the German Youth Movement and became a prominent leader in the Deutsche Freischar that formed part of it. He belonged to its "national revolutionary" tendency, which sought to marry elements of both the radical left and the radical right in order to form a Third Position between the Nazi Party and the Communist Party of Germany. To this end he established his own Arbeitsring Junge Front and subsequently the to promulgate his syncretic views. The latter group was established in 1930 due to his disillusionment with the Nazi Party, a group he had hitherto been well disposed towards, as he felt that their revolutionary rhetoric was insincere and that their essential nature was conservative. Nonetheless, he felt that the Nazi Party still contained "useful" revolutionary elements and was particularly active in attempting to win over members of the Hitler Youth to his side. In 1930 he became co-editor of Die Kommenden with prominent nationalist Ernst Jünger.
After escaping from internment by the French police in May 1940, he fled via southern France to Spain, and then to New York. There, he resumed his journalistic activities and worked as a correspondent. In 1943, he married his fiancée Elisabeth Zerner. After the war, he edited the magazine Deutsche Gegenwart and wrote about Jünger. In 1975, he died in Forest Hills, Queens, in New York City.

Publications

Sozialrevolutionärer Nationalismus,, 1930Das nationalbolschewistische Manifest, Die Sozialistische Nation, 1933; re-published by Haag + Herchen, 2012, ISBN 9783898466738
  • * Unofficial English translation: The National Bolshevist Manifesto, ARPLAN, 2019Ernst Jünger: die Wandlung eines deutschen Dichters und Patrioten,, 1946, re-published by Fölbach, 1995, ISBN 3-923532-30-XDas Bild vom Menschen in der deutschen Jugendführung, Voggenreiter Verlag, 1954Jugend in der Entscheidung: 1913, 1933, 1945, Voggenreiter Verlag, 1963Versuchung oder Chance?: Zur Geschichte des deutschen Nationalbolschewismus,, 1965
  • * Re-published as: Nationalbolschewismus und nationalrevolutionäre Bewegungen in Deutschland,, 1997, ISBN 9783926584496Reise ohne Uhrzeit: Autobiographie, re-published by World of Books, 1982, ISBN 9783921333907