Born in 1898 in South-West Germany, the son of a lumberjack, a student of Karl Korsch in
Jena, a colleague of Georg Lukács in Moscow, a militant of the Communist Part of Germany
(KPD), and later a member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKPB),
Schmückle was a prominent Marx expert, a literary critic and an editor of the first Marx-
Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA1). This article examines whether Schmückle can be called a
Western Marxist. To this end, it first investigates the theoretic, geological and social patterns
of Western Marxism and then detects similarities and differences between Schmückle and some
pioneering figures of Western Marxism. My main contention is that Western Marxist historiography
potentially excludes much of what stands and falls with Schmückle’s intellectual biography
and political identity. The way Western Marxism would read Schmückle leads to the
conclusion that Schmückle was a Westerner and a Marxist, but hardly a Western Marxist. This
suggests that either Western Marxism applies to him in a very loose sense or, alternatively, the
term can be empirically falsified in Schmückle’s case
