Theo Pinkus

Bookseller, communist and unorthodox thinker, 1909–1991

Born in Zurich in 1909, the son of a Jewish family that had emigrated from Wroclaw, Pinkus was initially drawn to the profession of bookseller and publisher through the political and literary affinities of his parents. As an apprentice of Ernst Rowohlt in Berlin and a colleague of the communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg, he lived through the final years of the Weimar Republic in Berlin before being forced to leave in 1933, just a few weeks after the Reichstag fire, when police confiscated his passport during a house search.

Back in Zurich, he threw himself into political agitation as a member of the small Communist Party of Switzerland. Working for the Moscow-controlled “RUNA” news agency, he remained in close contact with the Communist International. He was also involved in trade union and cultural activities, was a nature enthusiast, and worked for the “Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung” newspaper, which later became the Volksillustrierte. The indefatigable activist aroused the suspicions of the Swiss Federal Police, but in early 1939, when Switzerland’s politicians made common cause in opposition to Fascism, he was appointed programme editor of the “Landi” newspaper. Unsurprisingly Pinkus, an unorthodox thinker whose undogmatic approach and stubborn demands made him unpopular with the representatives of various left-wing movements he worked with, was expelled from the Communist Party in 1942.

In 1940 Theo Pinkus set up a book search service at Froschaugasse 17. This was joined in 1948 by the specialist socialist and labour movement bookshop at Predigergasse 7, which was for decades a meeting point for Zurich’s left. From 1948 to 1987 he published the weekly magazine “Zeitdienst” as a discussion forum for left-wing ideas. In 1974, to enable publication of a volume of documents on the history of the Swiss labour movement, he transferred his Limmat Verlag publishing house to the group of authors with whom he had compiled it. In 1971 Pinkus opened “Salecina”, a self-managed holiday house and centre for political seminars in Maloja. In all these activities he was ably assisted and supported by his wife Amalie Pinkus-De Sassi.

Theo and Amalie Pinkus established a monument to their unshakeable faith in the power of the written word in the form of the “Studienbibliothek zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung” (Study library on the history of the labour movement), which they transferred to a foundation. The collection of 50,000 titles, which was the legendary Zurich couple’s true life’s work, was transferred to the Zentralbibliothek Zürich in 2000 together with Pinkus’s personal library (mostly comprising fiction) and his estate.