By Merilyn Moos

‘Beaten but not Defeated. Siegfried Moos: a German anti-Nazi who settled in Britain’ is a biography of Siegi Moos, written by his daughter.

It  concentrates on the period 1929 to when the Nazis took over in Germany in early 1933 from a rare perspective. It looks at the panoply of overlapping grass-roots activities that characterised the revolutionary left in Germany, so different from anything we have experienced here.  Siegi,as a KPD member, was involved in organising the Red Front, the Humanists, in the lively debates around the importance of agit-prop theatre to working –class struggle and in the overlapping world of sporting organisations  and revolutionary politics. While the biography’s focus  is not the usual academic concentration of KPD’s political top-down Third Period zig-zags, Siegi’s activities are presented within their broader context and it is argued  that Siegi had a greater understanding than the KPD leadership  of the threat posed by the Nazis and the implications, partly  because he witnessed their early rise in Bavaria.

Siegi went underground and finally succeeded in escaping via France to Britain. Here he was briefly the Secretary of the KPD exile group, before, disillusioned, leaving the KPD in 1937. The book then considers his search for an alternative revolutionary path towards socialism, something he never succeeded in.  He became, in effect, a left reformist: after a job at the Institute of Statistics, Oxford University, during the war when he wrote on crucial supply and demand issues relating to the war economy ( and also advised the Free French),  He became a lecturer of economics at Durham University and finally worked as an economic advisor under Wilson.

After retirement , he returned to writing, and a book of his poetry, much of it confronting injustice,  was published posthumously.  He also started to paint expressionist style paintings, many portraying urban scenes in Hackney, where he lived with his wife, Lotte, till his death in 1988.

I wrote this biography as his daughter which created its own tensions but did give me one  close-up view of who Siegi was.

Beaten But Not Defeated

Siegfried Moos - A German anti-Nazi who settled in Britain

Merilyn Moos

Siegi Moos, an anti-Nazi and active member of the German Communist Party, escaped Germany in 1933 and, exiled in Britain, sought another route to the transformation of capitalism.

This biography charts Siegi’s life, starting in Germany when he witnessed the Bavarian uprisings of 1918/19 and moving to the later rise of the extreme right. We follow his progress in Berlin as a committed Communist and an active anti-Nazi in the well-organised Red Front, before much of the German Communist party (KPD) took the Nazis seriously, and his deep involvement in the Free Thinkers and in agit-prop theatre.

The book also describes Siegi’s life as an exile: the loss of family, comrades, his first language and ultimately his earlier political beliefs. Against a background of the loneliness of exile, the political and the personal became indissolubly intertwined when Siegi’s wife, Lotte, had a relationship with an Irish/Soviet spy.

Lastly, we look into Siegi’s time as a research worker at the prestigious Oxford Institute of Statistics at Oxford University from 1938, becoming an economic advisor under the Labour Prime Minister, Wilson, 1966-1970, and how, finally, after retirement, he returned to writing.

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• Oct 31, 2014. 978-1-78279-676-3.
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• Oct 31, 2014. 978-1-78279-677-0.
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