Olga Lang Papers

Olga Lang was born Dec. 11, 1897, in Russia to Jewish Communist parents. She was educated in Women’s University in Petrograd and became an active member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party before the 1917 Revolution. Not long after, she moved to Berlin with her first husband whom she later divorced and joined the German Communist Party. Her second husband, Karl August Wittfogel, was a prominent German intellectual and an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime which was just coming into power. He was arrested by the Nazis and thrown first into prison and then into concentration camps where he spent 8 months. Despite the fact that she was Jewish and a foreigner, Lang spent this time doing everything she could to get him out. Eventually she succeeded, and the couple escaped to China, where Lang learned the language and studied the culture. When Japan invaded China, she fled again, this time to the United States, where she began graduate study in Chinese.

She divorced her second husband. He subsequently renounced Communism and named her at the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. She eventually came to Swarthmore College in the 1960s and taught Russian because Swarthmore had no Chinese department. After retiring from Swarthmore, she returned to New York and affiliated with Columbia University. She died in 1992. See also:

Swarthmore College Bulletin December 2002 Feature piece on Olga Lang; http://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/dec02/em_lang.html)