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Rudolf Hamburger Biography & Facts

Rudolf Albert Hamburger (3 May 1903 – 1 December 1980) was a German Bauhaus-inspired architect. Many of his most important commissions were undertaken in Shanghai where he lived and worked between 1930 and 1936. Late in 1930, his wife Ursula Kuczynski was recruited to work for Soviet intelligence; he supported her espionage related activities in various practical ways until their divorce in 1939, after which he became involved with spying for the Soviets on his own account. By 1943 he had ended up in Tehran where British forces were present in large numbers. Imprisoned successively by American forces and British forces, when he managed to get away he made for the Soviet Union in order to seek asylum. Three days after arriving in Moscow he was arrested. He spent the next ten years in a succession of labour camps, and after a further two years in "internal exile" was able to leave the Soviet Union in 1955. He moved to Dresden and resumed his architectural career. Rudolf Hamburger is known to students of espionage as the first husband of Ursula Kuczynski, celebrated in some quarters as "Stalin's best female spy" ("Stalins beste Spionin"). Life Provenance and early years Rudolf Hamburger was born at Landeshut, a small town on the southern edge of Lower Silesia. He was the second of his parents' three recorded children, all of them boys. In 1890 his father, Max Hamburger (1868–1952), had inherited from an uncle one of the several textile mills in the town. The administration offices and storage facilities were adjacent to the family home. During the 1920s the business employed 850 people. Max Hamburger was for many years chairman of the local chamber of commerce and, unusually for his class, a committed activist in liberal politics. Else Gradenwitz, the boy's mother, was a banker's daughter: she looked out for the women working in the factory and provided a kindergarten for their children. The grandparents all lived in Breslau and vacation stays in the city were frequent. In 1908, inspired by the "Krupp settlement" in Essen, the firm had built a model housing estate ("Siedlung") for the workers. Hamburger would describe his upbringing as Liberal Jewish. He was encouraged, as a child, to play with the children of the workers at the factory and, to the extent that he was politically engaged, he shared his father's progressive tendencies. Many years later, after he died, an English friend would describe Rudolf Hamburger as "the last Victorian communist". Student years Rudolf Hamburger was taught to sketch by Friederich Iwan, a local artist, while he was still a boy. He successfully completed his schooling and moved to Munich to study architecture in 1922. The assassination of the Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, that year came as a particular blow. Rathenau had been a close personal friend of his father's: the shocking event and the rising tide of right-wing extremism, which was particularly hard to miss in Munich, demonstrated the fragility of the new liberal-democratic political order. Contemporary architects by whom he was particularly influenced during his two years in the Bavarian capital included Theodor Fischer (1863–1938), Gabriel von Seidl and German Bestelmeyer (1874–1942). He moved to Dresden in 1924 where he studied for around a year, and met Richard Paulick, a fellow trainee architect who became a close friend. Their careers would frequently become entwined during the decades that followed. In 1925 Hamburger and Paulick moved on to the Technical University of Berlin, where they shared lodgings. They were taught by Hans Poelzig, whom the students idolised. Poelzig renounced traditional teaching methods, instead holding classes in his studios at the Arts Academy, and giving his students tasks from his current commissions. Fellow students, as Hamburger later recalled, included alongside the (relatively) conventional German students, a Croiatian, an Austrian aristocrat, a Japanese who designed interiors in meticulously co-ordinated pastel shades, an anarchist and a Hungarian girl with a completely unjustified belief in her own genius. Often the group round his table also included a tall polite young man, a reticent and likeable youth keen, like the others, to master the architect's craft. The students, and almost everyone else, would learn more about Albert Speer after 1933. Rudolf Hamburger emerged with a degree in 1927. During 1926, while a student in Berlin, Rudolf Hamburger met Ursula Kuczynski, a qualified bookshop assistant. An unusual bookshop assistant, his new friend was also one of the six children of the distinguished demographer René Kuczynski. She had joined the Communist Party in May 1926 when she was just 19. Ursula was deeply committed politically and possessed of a formidable intellect. The two became friends and then lovers. They married in Berlin in 1929. Post-qualification Hamburger stayed in Berlin after graduating, taking a job as a construction manager with the Prussian Building and Finance directorate ("Preußischen Bau- und Finanzdirektion"). The job was not particularly stellar, but offered the possibility of taking more exams in order to become certified as a "master builder". In 1928 he took a job with Marie Frommer. There are suggestions that while with Frommer he probably worked on the "Hotel Villa" project in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. In October 1928 he became a Master Student ("Meisterschüler") at the Arts Academy studios with his former professor, Hans Poelzig. While there, till March 1930 he worked on the administrative building under construction for I.G.Farben at Frankfurt. There was also time for personal projects which earned him very little money, but nevertheless helped win recognition: he set up the "Red Bookshop" near the Görlitz Station for a friend of Ursula's. Political awareness Getting to know Richard Paulick during his year in Dresden had brought Rudolf Hamburger into contact with social democratic ideas. In Berlin his friendship with Ursula introduced him to leftist intellectual circles, and he became familiar with the aspirations of those who believed in a new better society. He found himself drifting away from the conservatism of others in the architectural profession, and drawn towards the optimistic radical pacifist idealism represented by artists such as Käthe Kollwitz. He kept his distance from day-to-day political activism. He joined no political party. But he did join "Red Aid", a workers' welfare organisation with close links to the Communist Party. Another member was Ursula's father, René Kuczynski. Hamburger began to read Marx and Engels. "I was no longer just an observer. I grasped the nature of the class-based social structure and drew from that the obligation to participate in class struggle. But I still found it difficult to take the next step, to political activism. I was still too strongly drawn to my family's middle class life, with the old prejudices and habits .... Above all I was alienated by .... Discover the Rudolf Hamburger popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Rudolf Hamburger books.