Evelyn Anderson (journalist)

Evelyn Anderson

Anderson (1909-77) was born Lore Seligmann to a German Jewish family and joined the German Communist Party (KPD) while a student in Frankfurt in 1927. She abandoned the KPD two years later over its sectarian attacks on the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and subsequently joined a small far-left SPD fraction, the Leninist Organisation (later known as New Beginnen). On Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 she left Germany for Britain, where she and her husband Paul Anderson (1908-72) became prominent members of the small group of socialist exiles from Nazism in Britain that included Julius Braunthal and Franz Borkenau.

Her long article ‘The Underground Struggle in Germany’, published under the pseudonym Evelyn Lend, occupied nearly the whole of an issue of Fact, edited by Raymond Postgate, in 1938. She revisited the subject in Hammer or Anvil?: The Story of the German Working Class Movement (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945), which George Orwell’s wife Eileen helped edit and which Orwell reviewed in the Manchester Evening News.

She and her husband worked for the British radio station Sender der Europäischen Revolution (European Revolutionary Station) which broadcast leftwing propaganda to Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1942. She joined Tribune in 1943 as assistant editor, taking particular responsibility for foreign affairs. She became a close friend of Orwell when he joined the paper later the same year, and her strong antipathy to communism played a major role in determining the paper’s political stance in the late 1940s – though she was considered obsessive about eastern Europe by some members of staff. She later collaborated with the historian Walter Laquer on A Dictionary of Politics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971).