Recording of Merilyn Moos Socialist History Seminar, Living With Shadows, Memoir of daughter of German Anti-Nazi activists
Merilyn Moos spoke to the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research on March 6th (organised by the London Socialist Historians Group) about her recent memoir Living With Shadows
Merilyn is the daughter of German Anti-Nazi activists. Her father Siegfried fled Germany on the night of the Reichstag fire and James Maxton the Labour MP secured him entry to Britain. He was a leading Berlin Communist who went on to lecture in economics and in the 1960s was a special advisor to Harold Wilson.
Her mother Lotte fled to Russia where she met an Irish Communist who was later imprisoned in and died in the Gulag as a supposed Trotskyist.
Merilyn recounted how her parents rarely talked of their past, or of their relatives murdered by the Nazis and warned her off political activity.
Notwithstanding this Merilyn went on to become a leading rank and file activist in the lecturers union (now the UCU) and a lifelong revolutionary socialist.
A powerful history of the present
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