Richard Sorge relative Friedrich Sorge
The one thing that made my life a little different from the average was a strong awareness of the fact that I had been born in the southern Caucasus and that we had moved to Berlin when I was very small.
Sorge attended Oberrealschule Lichterfelde when he was six. He described his father as having political views that were "unmistakably nationalist and imperialist", which he shared as a young man. However, the cosmopolitan Sorge household was "very different from the average bourgeois home in Berlin". Sorge considered Friedrich Adolf Sorge, an associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to be his grandfather, but he was actually Sorge's great-uncle.Sorge enlisted in the Imperial German Army in October 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I. At 18, he was posted to a field artillery battalion with the 3rd Guards Division. He served on the Western Front and was severely wounded there in March 1916. Shrapnel severed three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. He was promoted to the rank of corporal, received the Iron Cross and was later medically discharged. While fighting in the war, Sorge, who had started out in 1914 as a right-wing nationalist, became disillusioned by what he called the "meaninglessness" of the war and moved to the left.During his convalescence he read Marx, Engels and Rudolf Hilferding and eventually became a communist, mainly by the influence of the father of a nurse with whom he had developed a relationship. He spent the remainder of the war studying economics at the universities of Kiel, Berlin and Hamburg. In Kiel, he witnessed the sailors' mutiny which helped spark the German Revolution and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party. He subsequently moved on to Berlin, but arrived too late to participate in the Spartacist uprising.Sorge received his doctorate in political science (Dr. rer. pol.) from Hamburg in August 1919. By this time he had joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and was engaged as an activist for the party in Hamburg and subsequently Aachen. His political views got him fired from both a teaching job and coal mining work.
kin family member kinsman kinswoman relation by marriage