He was originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, but after the Second World War, he was an equally fierce anticommunist.

Karl August Wittfogel was born 6 September 1896 at Woltersdorf, in Lüchow, Province of Hanover to a Lutheran schoolteacher.

Wittfogel's second wife was Olga (Joffe) Lang, a Russian sociologist who traveled with him to China and collaborated with him on a project to analyze the Chinese family.

[8] Many years later Wittfogel was to publish an account of these youth movements under the pseudonym "Jungmann" in Max Horkheimer's compilation "Studies in Authority and the Family."

At the Meißnertag 1923, a large Youth Movement gathering, Wittfogel asked the members of the Freideutsche Jugend whether they knew the need of the age, its big idea and whether they had what it takes to die for their convictions.

[11] Wittfogel met Karl Korsch in 1920[12] and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the Institute for Social Research.

Felix Weil financed and Richard Sorge organized this Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche (1st marxist workweek) with Karl Korsch and Hedda Korsch, Georg Lukács, Béla Fogarasi, his later wife Margarete Lissauer, Félix José Weil and Käthe Weil (they were married 1921-1929), Richard and Christiane Sorge, Friedrich Pollock, Julian Gumperz and his later wife Hede Massing, from 1919 to 1923 married to Gerhart Eisler, Konstantin Zetkin, Fukumoto Kazuo, Eduard Ludwig Alexander and Gertrud Alexander, their child, and others.

In a short 1974 notice to a reprint of his 1929 essay on Political Geography, Wittfogel says he came out much stronger against the Nazis than the KPD and Komintern line wanted.

He turned against his former comrades and denounced American scholars such as Owen Lattimore and Moses I. Finley, at the McCarran Committee hearings in 1951.

He came to believe that the state-owned economies of the Soviet bloc inevitably led to despotic governments even more oppressive than those of "traditional Asia" and that those regimes were the greatest threat to the future of all mankind.

John Heartfield managed a half-hour late delivery of the backdrop [17] The KPD newspaper Die Rote Fahne published a harsh review of the plays,[18] and "Red Soldiers", "The Man Who Has an Idea", "The Mother", "The Refugee", "The Skyscraper" and "Who is the Biggest Fool?

[19] Wittfogel declined an offer to become the dramatic producer of the revolutionary Volksbühne (People's Stage) in Berlin, because he wanted to concentrate on his academic studies.

[20] He published Hegelian essays on aesthetics and literature in Die Linkskurve, journal of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, and was a member of its editorial staff from April 1930.

[citation needed] Wittfogel is best known for his monumental work Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, first published in 1957.

Starting from a Marxist analysis of the ideas of Max Weber on China and India's "hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" and building on Marx's sceptical view of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Wittfogel came up with an analysis of Oriental despotism which emphasized the role of irrigation works, the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them and the impact that they had on society.

F. Tökei, Gianni Sofri, Maurice Godelier and Wittfogel's estranged pupil Lawrence Krader, concentrated on the concept.

Then East German dissident Rudolf Bahro later said that his Alternative in Eastern Europe was based on ideas of Wittfogel but because of the latter's later anticommunism, could not mention him by name.