Karl Korsch (1886–1961) came up through the protean socialist culture of pre-First World War Germany and Europe, and was then decisively formed politically as a dissident soldier at the front, active as a delegate in the soldiers’ councils in 1918 and participating in the creation of the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1920. He was minister for Justice in the Communist–Social Democrat government of Thuringia, in central Germany, in 1923, and later a Reichstag deputy in Berlin.

A teacher at the University of Jena in the early 1920s, Korsch published his key work, Marxism and Philosophy, in 1923—in the same year as Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and with the same fate, official censure in the Communist International. Uneasy from the start about the strict, Moscow-focused centralism of the Comintern, Korsch now passed into open opposition and was expelled from the German party in 1926, in this respect differing from Lukács, for whom continuing party membership was never negotiable. Korsch left Germany after the Nazi seizure of power, eventually settling in the United States.

Hedda Gagliardi (1890–1982) was born into a bourgeois family with strong intellectual and artistic associations. (Her grandmother was the feminist writer and actor Hedwig Dohm.) She married Korsch in 1913 and, like him, rallied to the KPD in 1920. From 1916 onwards, she worked in experimental schools and in the Soviet Trade Mission in Berlin, until the KPD leaders had her dismissed because of her relationship with Korsch. She later taught at the Karl-Marx-Schule in Berlin and left Germany in 1933. Hedda Korsch gave this interview in 1972.