Carl Heidenreich’s participation in the POUM during the Spanish Civil War is highlighted in Andy Durgan’s recently-published book Voluntarios por la Revolución: La Milicia Internacional del POUM en la Guerra Civil Española (Barcelona: Laertes S.L. de Ediciones, 2022).

Identifying 367 of over 500 members of the POUM, including those in the Lenin International Column as well as the more populous Batallón de Choque (to which Heidenreich belonged), his volume contributes a great deal to a specific understanding of the POUM’s place in the Spanish Civil War, far beyond its description popularized by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. Where Orwell presented a vision of disorganized and badly prepared ranks of young soldiers, Durgan digs into specifics and shows a complex network of refugees, anarchists, Communists, and anti-Fascists fighting alongside one another. For example, Durgan expands on the presence of women on the front lines of the POUM, including Eva Laufer, Olga Preiss, Angelina Wasserman, Margarete Zimbal, as well as Mika Feldman de Etchebéhère, the Argentine anarchist militant who served as a captain in the POUM militia.

In one early section of Voluntarios por la Revolución, Durbin writes about Carl Heidenreich’s political journey in the Spataksbund, KPD, and KPD(O). (See pp. 67–68, reproduced below in a rough translation from Spanish; corrections noted in brackets with an asterisk.)

Another KPD(O) militant and future POUM militiaman who arrived in the months before the Civil War was the painter Karl Heidenreich. In 1916, at the age of fifteen, against the wishes of his parents, he had gone to Munich to study Art for three years with Hans Hoffman, considered one of the most avant-garde artists of the time. Influenced by Hoffman, Heidenreich would become a leading exponent of [Abstract*] Expressionism. In the meantime, he joined Rosa Luxemburg's Spataksbund and, at eighteen, would be part of the KPD when it was founded in early 1919. He would leave the KPD in 1929 to join the KPD(O). The same year that he joined the KPD, Heidenreich, despite his youth, was elected delegate to the Bavarian Workers' and Soldiers' Council that would establish a "Soviet republic" in the region in April 1919. With the fall of the brand new workers' state barely a month later, Heidenreich escaped to Berlin where he would work as a portraitist and set painter at the Universal Film Studios in Babelsberg. In 1925 he exhibited for the first time at the Berlin Art Academy; but it is his solo exhibition of “haunting” urban landscapes at the Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin in 1933 that is considered the most important milestone in his career as an artist up to that time. However, the coming to power of the Nazis would cut short his artistic career. From then on his art would be considered “degenerate” and more than three hundred of his works were destroyed. At the same time, his wife, Lia, being Jewish, and his daughter Monica, went into hiding with the Heidenreich family [and friends, including the Brandts*]; they did not see each other again until 1947, when he was already established in New York. Heidenreich himself was locked up in Moabit jail. Released in 1934 (as a consequence of the “Hindeberg amnesty”), Heidenreich went to France from where he was expelled to Barcelona in 1936. Like some other refugees he was arrested upon arrival in Spain for lack of valid documentation, but a campaign for his freedom, supported by the POUM, got him out of prison early.

Heidenreich is mentioned throughout Durgan’s book on the following pages, as listed in the index: 25, 66–8, 92, 98–9, 117, 142, 239, 269f, 367, 378, 401, 415, 416, 424, 431, 463, 464, 487, 488, 491, 494, 497, 506, 558, 575, 646, 652.

A recording of Durgan’s recent lecture, “Volunteers for the Revolution:the international POUM volunteers in the Spanish Civil War” presented at the Orwell Society on October 28, 2022, is available on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT5-uMEa9aY

Durgan’s book is available from Casa del Libro at:
https://www.casadellibro.com/libro-voluntarios-por-la-revolucion/9788418292682/12953851