Maik Hamburger (12 February 1931 – 16 January 2020) was a German translator, writer and dramaturge, regarded as one of the leading Shakespeare scholars of his generation in the German-speaking world.
By the time he was ten, he had lived successively in China, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Switzerland, before ending up in England in 1940, after his mother had married Len Beurton, also a Soviet agent, and one who came with the added attraction of a British passport for his new wife.
Later his mother moved into a village outside the city while her son—possibly in connection with his maternal grandfather's senior lectureship at the London School of Economics—lived "as a cultural omnivore" in London, attending performances at the city's famous theatres and sitting in the top gallery at each of them where, as he later recalled, you "could sit on a hard bench for sixpence and view the action from an overhead perspective".
[10] At weekends he often attended Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, listening to orators setting out their visions for solving the world's problems, and staying late into the night till there were no more than two people left, at which point he underwent, on at least one occasion, the unsettling experience of being approached by an orator whose chief objective seemed to have become an unsuccessful (as he insisted!)
One of his teachers, as Professor of Moral Philosophy, was Donald M. MacKinnon (1913-1994), known to friends and students alike as "Mac", a "corpulent eccentric" whose teaching was based around Kant and Hegel.
[10] The other principal teacher was a glamorous Polish exile called Wladyslaw Bednarowski (1908-2002),[11] whose contributions involved invoking Wittgenstein, Ryle and Ayer to prove that "90% of what Kant and Hegel wrote was senseless twaddle" ("aus sinnlosem Geschwätz besteht").
[10] Hamburger realised he did not wish to spend the rest of his life trying to create new patterns of philosophy by "reconfiguring very old ones",[10] and he became "disillusioned with Britain’s turn right".
[12] Shortly before the unmasking of Klaus Fuchs, his mother had relocated suddenly from north Oxfordshire to (east) Berlin in 1950, and in August 1951 Maik Hamburger visited the city to attend the "Weltfestspiele der Jugend und Studenten" ("World Festival of Youth and Students").
[13] An important member of the group was the student Adolf Dresen,[13] who became a colleague and later a notable and, some said, controversial theatre and opera director.