Paul Lensch (31 March 1873 in Potsdam, Province of Brandenburg – 18 November 1926 in Berlin) was a war journalist, editor, author of several books and politician in the SPD.
From 1902 he was associate editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung[2]: 173 and next to Rosa Luxemburg, Alexander Parvus, Franz Mehring and Karl Liebknecht he was spokesman for the Anti-revisionist Left in the SPD.
Lensch became a spokesman for the mainstream SPD, called MSPD (Mehrheits-SPD, "majority-SPD"), which was under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert who had supported the war from the start.
Lensch was also a member of the foreign policy staff of the conservative Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper belonging to Hugo Stinnes, a famous industrialist and politician.
From June 1922 to November 1925 he was editor of the DAZ Lensch, and increasingly became more and more closely associated with conservative opponents of Social Democracy.
Large national industries, a bureaucratically regulating state and a strong work force are for Lensch, the new socialist "Volksgemeinschaft" (unity of a people).
The now emerging Germany threatened this supremacy, because it stands as a contrast to the individualistic England, and is instead a strong solidarity-oriented country, with no conventional bourgeoisie.
Germany was no longer as reactionary as in the times of Wilhelmine Empire, but had developed democratic elements, which Lensch believed would be increased.
He pointed out that German trade unions were the strongest and most tightly sealed, and contrasted this with the British labor movement and privileges conceded to the bourgeoisie.
The fact that Lensch mixed this with Marxist ideas, creating an authoritarian, nationalist model of socialism, is far from unique.
Also famous is the work 1789 und 1914: Die symbolischen Jahre in der Geschichte des politischen Geistes by Johann Plenge.
Through the foundation of the Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch Group, Lensch also was close to Alexander Parvus and he was strongly influenced by Professor Johann Plenge,[5] himself the Ph.D. advisor of Kurt Schumacher and the ancestor of the right-wing tendency in today's SPD known as Seeheimer Kreis.