Kheel Center Treasure

A stack of typed papers tinged brown by time sat virtually untouched in the Kheel Center for decades.

Now, the world will be invited to read the diary of American labor activist Abraham Plotkin, visiting Berlin the fateful winter Hitler seized power.

Plotkin's remembrances of Germany in 1932-33 were lifted from obscurity in 2001, when Kheel reference archivist Patrizia Sione recalled seeing the diary and told a visiting scholar about the Plotkin collection.

Catherine Collomp of France was immediately interested.

She put aside the union research which had drawn her across the ocean to the Kheel Center and began reading Plotkin's unpublished diary, which focuses on the German working class, the labor movement and the plight of German Jews.

"… I was seized with the emotion of discovering a treasure," Collomp writes in "An American in Hitler's Berlin:  Abraham Plotkin's Diary, 1932-33."

Collomp will discuss the book at 4:30 p.m. April 2 in Ives Hall 105.  The talk, which will be followed by a book signing, is sponsored by the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives.

In the introduction to the book, published this year by the University of Illinois Press, Collomp and co-editor Bruno Groppo write about Plotkin, who had been the Pacific Coast organizer for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in the 1920s.

Plotkin's diary, they said, is the only known instance of an American labor leader writing about the German labor movement in 1932-1933.

In 1932, like many others in America and in Europe, he was unemployed.

He traveled to Germany to observe German labor's response to the economic crisis. 

In a preface to the diary, Collomp and Groppo write, "Plotkin intended to receive from the main labor leaders and Social Democratic Party officials in Berlin an introduction to a more advanced stage of labor relations than existed in the United States in these pre-New Deal years."

Two months after Plotkin arrived in Germany, Hitler became Germany's chancellor.

The destruction of Germany's labor movement and much more would unfold in front of Plotkin during his seven-month stay in Berlin.

"He saw the end of the Weimar Republic, the downfall of social democracy, and the rise of a reign of terror," according to the editors.

Collomp is a professor of American history at Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot.  Groppo, a comparative labor history specialist, is a researcher at the Centre National de la   Recherche Scientifique in Paris.

Plotkin donated his papers to the Kheel Center in 1979.  He died nine years later in Los Angeles.