Herwarth Walden

German Expressionist artist and gallery owner, art expert, who was the founder of the radical German Expressionist magazine 'Der Sturm', born. He was married to the German Expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who invented his pseudonym, inspired by Thoreau’s 'Walden' (1854). He was also an early collaborator on Pfemfert's anarchist magazine 'Der Kampf'. In 1919 he joined the German Communist Party (KPD) and, in 1924, he was divorced from Lasker-Schüler. With the economic depression of the 1930s and the subsequent rise of National Socialism, his activities were compromised. In 1932, he married again and left Germany shortly later because of the threat of the Gestapo. He went to Moscow, where he worked as a teacher and publisher. His sympathies for the avant-garde soon aroused the suspicion of the Stalinist Soviet government, and he had to repeatedly defend against the equation of avant-garde and fascism. Walden died in October 1941 in a Soviet prison in Saratov.