Walter Janka (29 April 1914 – 17 March 1994) was a German communist, political activist and writer who became a publisher.
Janka is notable for having spent time incarcerated as a political prisoner under the rule of the Nazis and later imprisoned under suspicion of counter-revolutionary activities by the Supreme Court of East Germany, in both cases serving most of his sentence at Bautzen prison.
Biography
Early years
Walter Janka was one of six children born to a tool and die maker called Adalbert Janka. He attended junior school from 1920 till 1928. Between 1928 and 1932 he undertook a type setting apprenticeship.
In 1930 Walter Janka became an Organisation Leader, and then a Political leader of the Young Communists (KJVD / Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands) for the Chemnitz sub-region. After his elder brother, Albert, had been murdered by the Nazis, Walter himself was imprisoned by the Gestapo. He was remanded to custody in Chemnitz and in Freiberg before being tried and convicted under German law of preparing to commit high treason (). After 1½ years of imprisonment in Bautzen prison, he spent a six-month term in Sachsenburg concentration camp. Finally, in 1935 he was deported to Czechoslovakia.
Civil war in Spain, internment in France, exile in Mexico
In 1936 Janka went to Spain to join the Thälmann Battalion and fight in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 he became a Captain, and shortly after that, in the Karl Marx Division, he became the youngest Major, and then a Battalion Commander, in the International Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army.
During a 1991 interview with German-American journalist and retired U.S. intelligence official John O. Koehler, Janka, recalled his encounters in Spain with fellow KPD exile and future East German Secret police chief Erich Mielke. During the winter of 1936, Janka was summoned by the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the political police of the Second Spanish Republic, and personally interrogated by Mielke. Mielke demanded to know why Janka had voluntarily traveled from Czechoslovakia to Spain rather than being assigned there by the Party. When he told Mielke to get lost, the SIM demoted Janka back to the ranks and then expelled him from the International Brigade. Decades later, Janka told Koehler, "While I was fighting at the front, shooting at the Fascists, Mielke served in the rear, shooting Trotskyites and Anarchists."
During the second part of 1938, Janka was badly wounded during the Battle of the Ebro.
After the Nationalist faction won the war, Janka fled to the Third French Republic, where he was interned between 1939 and 1941 at Camp Vernet. He then escaped via Casablanca in November 1941, and ending up in exile in Mexico, where together with Paul Merker and Alexander Abusch he founded the "Free Germany" ("Freies Deutschland") movement and contributed to the anti-Nazi movement in German literature known as Exilliteratur.
In Mexico he ran the publishing business "El Libro Libre", which also employed fellow exiled German writer Anna Seghers. In 1946 Janka took over leadership of the Mexican section of the German Communist Party (KPD) in exile.
Back in Germany
After the end of the Second World War Janka returned, in April 1947, to what was Soviet occupation zone, later to become German Democratic Republic in 1949. In 1947 he married his long-standing partner, a translator called Charlotte (Lotte) Scholz. The couples' two children, André and Yvonne, were born in 1948 and 1950.
After a brief period working with the leadership of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany/Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) he joined the board of DEFA, the state-owned film studio. He was appointed managing director on 6 October 1948. He was replaced in the top job in 1949, but remained on the executive board till 1950.
In February 1950 he became Deputy Director of the Berlin-based Aufbau-Verlag, then the country's leading publishing house, moving up to the top job in 1953. During this time he planned a project to make a film based on Thomas Mann's novel of dynastic decline, Buddenbrooks, which was to be a collaboration between East Germany's DEFA and West German film companies. Another ambition, in pursuit of which he met Charlie Chaplin near the latter's home at Vevey in May 1954, was a DEFA film with Charlie Chaplin as the leading star.