Kuczynski, Jürgen

Born Sept. 17, 1904, in Elberfeld. Economist, historian, and public figure of the German Democratic Republic; member of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (1955). Became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in 1946.

Kuczynski studied philosophy, statistics, and finance at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, and Erlangen and was involved in the German workers’ movement. His first works, published from the mid-1920’s to the early 1930’s, are critiques of bourgeois statistics and theories of finance. In 1936 he emigrated to Great Britain and came out against the Nazi regime. Since the defeat of fascism he has been living and working in the GDR. He became a professor of political economy at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1946. His chief works deal with the standard of living of the working class under capitalism and uncover the essence and methods of capitalist exploitation. He has also written on the history of the world economy and on German economic history. In 1949 he was awarded the National Prize of the GDR.