German, Jew, Communist, Catholic: The Conversions of Hermann Borchardt

This article explores the ideological transformations and literary legacy of forgotten émigré writer Hermann Borchardt (1888–1951). When he arrived in the United States in 1937, Borchardt had already experienced life under Soviet and Nazi regimes, surviving a yearlong stint in Dachau and Sachsenhausen. A member of the German Communist Party in the 1920s, and a concentration camp survivor of Jewish origins, Borchardt surprised many in the émigré community when he embarked on a new path as a political reactionary and staunch anti-Communist, cementing his ideological bona fides by converting to Catholicism. Drawing on Borchardt’s political essays, private correspondence, literary works and unpublished manuscripts, this article reconstructs Borchardt’s ideological trajectory from leftwing Weimar intellectual to Cold War Christian conservative. Focusing on the author’s anti-Communism, conspiratorial antisemitism, and Christian nationalism, this paper unpacks the cultural logic of these overlapping and mutually affirming discourses. It analyzes the centrality of anti-Judaism to Borchardt’s worldview and demonstrates how he maps his political identity onto the symbolic language of Jewish-Christian difference.