German writing translations

Translations of German writings by Paul Alexander Baran (1909-1964). Translated by Nicholas Baran.

Note from the translator, Nicholas Baran:

The documents in this folder are translations of all the writings in German found in the files of my father, Paul A. Baran. With the exception of one unpublished manuscript, written in 1939, the documents were all written between 1930 and 1933. These translated documents are all available online: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8xs5zkx/. Note that these are quite literal translations and little attention has been given to literary English style (as would be expected in a translation for publication).

Paul Baran, at the age of 21, was a graduate student at the University of Breslau in 1931. Breslau was at the time part of Germany but is now a city in Poland, also known as Wroclaw. Baran had been working as a research assistant for Dr. Friedrich Pollock at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research from 1929 to 1930, collecting and preparing material for the second volume of a treatise on the Soviet economy, when Pollock asked him to transfer to the Institute for Eastern Europe at the University of Breslau, to continue that work, as the Breslau institute had the largest collection of the relevant literature.

According to my father's biographical statement, "When […] in the autumn of 1930 I went to Breslau […], the threat of Hitlerism was looming large on the political horizon. […] I was very active in the social-democratic student organization, frequently spoke in social-democratic and trade-union meetings, wrote leaflets and articles for the social-democratic newspaper and regularly spoke over the radio."

In my father's files there were a series of typewritten transcripts of these talks, written in German, which I have translated. These talks were broadcast on the Silesian Broadcasting Corporation's radio station (Schlesische Rundfunk). The collection of radio transcripts, translated from the German, are available online: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8xs5zkx/.

In Paul's last year in Germany (1932-33), he had returned to Berlin to complete his doctoral thesis. During that time, he became acquainted with Rudolf Hilferding, who been at one time the finance minister for Germany, and was a leading Marxist economist active in the German Socialist Democratic Party. Hilferding edited and published a journal called "Die Gesellschaft." Concerned about the security of his family in the Soviet Union, Paul wrote articles for "Die Gesellschaft" under the pen-name Alexander Gabriel. He also wrote articles for other publications using various pen-names.

See translatorsnotePABGermanwritings.pdf for more details.