Willi Schlamm

William 'Willi' S. Schlamm (originally Wilhelm Siegmund Schlamm, June 10, 1904 – September 1, 1978) was an Austrian-American journalist.

Biography

Schlamm was born into an upper middle class Jewish family in Przemyśl, Galicia, in the Austrian Empire. He became a Communist early in life, and when he was 16 years old was invited to the Kremlin to meet Vladimir Lenin. After completing secondary school, he became a writer with the Vienna Communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne. He left the Communist Party in 1929 and joined the left-wing magazine Die Weltbühne in 1932.[1] His book Diktatur der Lüge: Eine Abrechnung mit Stalin (Dictatorshop of Lies: A Reckoning with Stalin) was published in Zurich in 1937.[2] He was in correspondence with Otto Rühle and Alice Rühle-Gerstel, sending them a copy. Rühle sent a reply in August 1937.

Later, Schlamm moved to the United States, where he worked for Henry Luce, the publisher of Life, Time and Fortune magazines. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944 alongside code breaker Jeremy Spiro.[3]

Schlamm encouraged William F. Buckley, Jr. to found the conservative magazine, National Review, with Buckley as the sole owner. Schlamm became a senior editor but was later fired by Buckley.[4] He then became associate editor of the John Birch Society's journal, American Opinion.[5] After writing for conservative magazines, he returned to Germany in 1972, where he was a controversial columnist for Axel Springer's Die Welt am Sonntag[6] and published the magazine Die Zeitbühne. He died in 1978 in Salzburg.[7]

Schlamm is remembered for having coined the saying, "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists."[8] After World War II, he worked as journalist for German newspaper Die Welt.

External links

• Germany And The East West Crisis The Decisive Challenge To American Policy (1959, online)

Notes

1. Lange
2. Schrenck-Notzing, Caspar von (29 November 2022). Lexikon des Konservatismus (in German). BoD – Books on Demand. ISBN 978-3-99081-105-4.
3. Lange
4. Regnery, pp. 63-64
5. Bjerre-Poulsen, p. 205
6. Goshko, John (22 April 1973). "Axel Springer: Germany's Luce" (PDF). Washington Post. Retrieved 15 February 2021.
7. Lange
8. Bridges and Coin, p. 51

References

• Bjerre-Poulsen, Niels. Right face: organizing the American conservative movement 1945-65. Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002 ISBN 87-7289-809-7
• Bridges, Linda and Coyne, John R. Strictly Right: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the American conservative movement. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007 ISBN 0-471-75817-5
• Lange, Ansgar. Eine Kassandra von rechts: William S. Schlamm und seine Fundamentalkritik der frühen Bundesrepublik ("A Cassandra from the Right: William S. Schlamm and his fundamental critique of the early Federal Republic"). In: Eigentümlich frei, 10 April 2009.
• Regnery, Alfred S. Upstream: the ascendance of American conservatism. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2008 ISBN 1-4165-2288-3