Bornstein, Joseph

Joseph Bornstein was born on October 18, 1899 in Kraków, Poland, at that time part of the Habsburg monarchy. His father was a Russian citizen. After his death the family moved to Berlin in 1905. Joseph Bornstein attended the Sophien-Gymnasium and later the universities in Berlin and in Vienna. After the First World War, Joseph Bornstein became stateless and in 1925 was granted German citizenship that was revoked after 1933. Around the year 1920 Joseph Bornstein joined the circle of young socialist enthusiasts gravitating around Paul Levi (1883-1930), a cofounder of the German Communist Party (KPD) who re-joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) after disagreement with their Communist leadership in 1922. In this intellectual milieu Joseph Bornstein met Leopold Schwarzschild (1891-1950), Stefan Großmann (1875-1935), and Valeriu Marcu (1899-1942).

Joseph Bornstein started his collaboration with Leopold Schwarzschild and Stefan Großmann's intellectual journal the Tagebuch in 1923 where he worked on cases of political and social injustice in interwar Germany. After editor-in-chief Carl von Ossietzky left the Tagebuch for the Weltbühne in 1927, Joseph Bornstein became an executive editor, since Leopold Schwarzschild formally kept the position of editor-in-chief. He led the newspaper until 1931 when he resigned from this post, but remained closely associated with the Tagebuch . Joseph Bornstein's reports and investigative work were highly prized and he was extolled as a Wunderkind of German journalism in an obituary in the Aufbau . He covered a story of the investigation and trial of the murders of German Communist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht Karl, the story of Sacco and Vanzetti, and others. Joseph Bornstein was a member of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (German League for Human Rights).

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