Vicente Lombardo Toledano and the German Communist Exile in Mexico, 1940-1947

During the Second World War, Mexico City became the second largest centre, after Moscow, of the German communist exile. This episode has been well explored by a dedicated group of German and Austrian scholars,! in German, thus excluding non-German speakers from the discussion. The attention given to the approximately sixty2 or so German Communist Party (KPD) members in Mexico is mainly due to the prominence of some ofthem, among them Egon Erwin Kisch, Ludwig Renn, Bodo Uhse, André Simone, and Anna Seghers. But it is also due to the fact that the KPD group, none of whom spoke much Spanish upon their arrival, enjoyed the generous support of the Mexican labour leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano which made it possible for them to publish their own newspaper Freies Deutschland (Free Germany) with a circulation of between three and four thousand copies, and establish their own publishing house where such classics as The Seventh Cross (1943) by Anna Seghers3 and the ‘demon reporter’ Kisch's volumes on Mexico and his autobiography appeared.4 © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.