WOLF, Friedrich.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Von New York bis Schanghai: First edition, first printing, of a scarce antifascist play found in only seven libraries worldwide (one outside Germany), with this the sole copy in commerce. Friedrich Wolf, later the East German ambassador to Poland, was a prominent left-wing German playwright forced to live in exile in the USSR in the 1930s.Issued in a print-run of 3,000 copies, Wolf's (1888-1953) Von New York bis Schanghai focuses on a communist organiser, Wang, and his attempts to unite the Chinese working classes after the Japanese invasion of the northern part of the country. The plot demonstrates Wolf's belief in the power of organized labour in the face of the centralised state authoritarianism that he could see developing in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. "The play ends with quick, almost simultaneous, scenes in Calcutta, Detroit and Marseilles, that are supposed to show the power of the collective and international movement" (p. 125).It was the First World War and the horrors he witnessed at the front line that first pushed Wolf leftwards, and at the end of the war he joined the revolutionary Workers' and Soldiers' Council. During the 1920s, he worked in different parts of Germany as a physician, joined the German Communist Party in 1928, and visited the USSR in 1931-32. In 1932, he formed a communist agitprop troupe in Stuttgart which performed pieces about controversial contemporary topics, and it was at this time that he wrote the manuscript of Von New York bis Schan

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