Rudolf Albert Hamburger (3 May 1903 – 1 December 1980) was a German Bauhaus-inspired architect. Many of his most important commissions were undertaken in Shanghai where he lived and worked between 1930 and 1936. Late in 1930, his wife Ursula Kuczynski was recruited to work for Soviet intelligence; he supported her espionage related activities in various practical ways until their divorce in 1939, after which he became involved with spying for the Soviets on his own account.
By 1943 he had ended up in Tehran where British forces were present in large numbers. Imprisoned successively by American forces and British forces, when he managed to get away he made for the Soviet Union in order to seek asylum. Three days after arriving in Moscow he was arrested. He spent the next ten years in a succession of labour camps, and after a further two years in "internal exile" was able to leave the Soviet Union in 1955. He moved to Dresden and resumed his architectural career.
Rudolf Hamburger is known to students of espionage as the first husband of Ursula Kuczynski, celebrated in some quarters as "Stalin's best female spy" ("Stalins beste Spionin").
Life Provenance and early years Rudolf Hamburger was born at Landeshut, a small town on the southern edge of Lower Silesia. He was the second of his parents' three recorded children, all of them boys. In 1890 his father, Max Hamburger (1868–1952), had inherited from an uncle one of the several textile mills in the town. The administration offices and storage facilities were adjacent to the family home. During the 1920s the business employed 850 people. Max Hamburger was for many years chairman of the local chamber of commerce and, unusually for his class, a committed activist in liberal politics. Else Gradenwitz, the boy's mother, was a banker's daughter: she looked out for the women working in the factory and provided a kindergarten for their children. The grandparents all lived in Breslau and vacation stays in the city were frequent. In 1908, inspired by the "Krupp settlement" in Essen, the firm had built a model housing estate ("Siedlung") for the workers. Hamburger would describe his upbringing as Liberal Jewish. He was encouraged, as a child, to play with the children of the workers at the factory and, to the extent that he was politically engaged, he shared his father's progressive tendencies. Many years later, after he died, an English friend would describe Rudolf Hamburger as "the last Victorian communist".
Student years Rudolf Hamburger was taught to sketch by Friederich Iwan, a local artist, while he was still a boy. He successfully completed his schooling and moved to Munich to study architecture in 1922. The assassination of the Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, that year came as a particular blow. Rathenau had been a close personal friend of his father's: the shocking event and the rising tide of right-wing extremism, which was particularly hard to miss in Munich, demonstrated the fragility of the new liberal-democratic political order. Contemporary architects by whom he was particularly influenced during his two years in the Bavarian capital included Theodor Fischer (1863–1938), Gabriel von Seidl and German Bestelmeyer (1874–1942). He moved to Dresden in 1924 where he studied for around a year, and met Richard Paulick, a fellow trainee architect who became a close friend. Their careers would frequently become entwined during the decades that followed.
In 1925 Hamburger and Paulick moved on to the Technische Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin), where they shared lodgings. They were taught by Hans Poelzig, whom the students idolised. Poelzig renounced traditional teaching methods, instead holding classes in his studios at the Arts Academy, and giving his students tasks from his current commissions. Fellow students, as Hamburger later recalled, included alongside the (relatively) conventional German students, a Croiatian, an Austrian aristocrat, a Japanese who designed interiors in meticulously co-ordinated pastel shades, an anarchist and a Hungarian girl with a completely unjustified belief in her own genius. Often the group round his table also included a tall polite young man, a reticent and likeable youth keen, like the others, to master the architect's craft. The students, and almost everyone else, would learn more about Albert Speer after 1933. Rudolf Hamburger emerged with a degree in 1927.
During 1926, while a student in Berlin, Rudolf Hamburger met Ursula Kuczynski, a qualified bookshop assistant. An unusual bookshop assistant, his new friend was also one of the six children of the distinguished demographer René Kuczynski. She had joined the Communist Party in May 1926 when she was just 19. Ursula was deeply committed politically and possessed of a formidable intellect. The two became friends and then lovers. They married in Berlin in 1929.
Post-qualification Hamburger stayed in Berlin after graduating, taking a job as a construction manager with the Prussian Building and Finance directorate ("Preußischen Bau- und Finanzdirektion"). The job was not particularly stellar, but offered the possibility of taking more exams in order to become certified as a "master builder". In 1928 he took a job with Marie Frommer. There are suggestions that while with Frommer he probably worked on the "Hotel Villa" project in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. In October 1928 he became a Master Student ("Meisterschüler") at the Arts Academy studios with his former professor, Hans Poelzig. While there, till March 1930 he worked on the administrative building under construction for I.G.Farben at Frankfurt. There was also time for personal projects which earned him very little money, but nevertheless helped win recognition: he set up the "Red Bookshop" near the Görlitz Station for a friend of Ursula's.
Political awareness Getting to know Richard Paulick during his year in Dresden had brought Rudolf Hamburger into contact with social democratic ideas. In Berlin his friendship with Ursula introduced him to leftist intellectual circles, and he became familiar with the aspirations of those who believed in a new better society. He found himself drifting away from the conservatism of others in the architectural profession, and drawn towards the optimistic radical pacifist idealism represented by artists such as Käthe Kollwitz. He kept his distance from day-to-day political activism. He joined no political party. But he did join "Red Aid", a workers' welfare organisation with close links to the Communist Party. Another member was Ursula's father, René Kuczynski. Hamburger began to read Marx and Engels. "I was no longer just an observer. I grasped the nature of the class-based social structure and drew from that the obligation to participate in class struggle. But I still found it difficult to take the next step, to political activism. I was still too strongly drawn to my family's middle class life, with the old prejudices and habits .... Above all I was alienated by the hostile attitude that the Communist Party displayed towards the SPD" ("Ich wurde nicht nur Betrachter, sondern erfasste das Wesen der Klassengesellschaft und die Verpflichtung, daraus die Konsequenz des Klassenkampfes zu ziehen. Der Schritt zur Aktivität fiel mir dennoch schwer. Zu stark war ich noch dem bürgerlichen Leben durch Elternhaus, alte Vorurteile und Gewohnheiten verbunden. ... Vor allem befremdete mich die feindliche Haltung der KPD gegen die SPD").
Shanghai Start of the adventure From a western perspective, in 1930 Shanghai was seen as a dynamic capitalist enclave surrounded by a feudal society. That offered opportunities for foreign entrepreneurs. The authorities were keen to attract investment: labour was abundant and inexpensive. The huge disparities of wealth and poverty also created a febrile political environment. It was in Shanghai that the Chinese Communist Party had been founded in 1921. The economy was hugely dynamic. The political context was defined by massive tensions. The community of expatriates from the west included White Russian émigrés escaping the consequences of the Russian Civil War who would be joined, after 1933, by large numbers of German refugees forced to leave their homeland by Nazi race policies. There were international businessmen driven by conventional commercial and colonialist motives. All the time, there was a Chinese nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek keen to re-assert control over Shanghai. The creation by the government of the "Greater Shanghai" municipality on 14 July 1927, covering 828,000 hectares, had been a first step in that direction, even though it had been necessary to exclude from it the territory of the foreign concessions. In 1930 Shanghai was the focus of an on-going power struggle between the Chinese authorities and international business, backed by the "great powers", America, Britain, France and, increasingly,had no friends· Japan.
During the first half of 1930, Rudolf Hamburger responded to a job advertisement placed in a local Berlin newspaper by the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC). His application was successful and in July 1930, armed with a contract to work as an architect with the SMC, he emigrated with his wife to Shanghai. Long distance travel was typically undertaken by sea during this period, but the Hamburgers travelled by train via Moscow and across Siberia to Manchuria, where they switched to a ship for the final part of the journey. One source indicates that this slightly unconventional route was chosen in order to save money, since the SMC had refused to pay their travel expenses. Shortly before they left Berlin Ursula's parents organised a dinner party to which they invited Hellmut Wilhelm, the son of a celebrated (but recently deceased) "China expert". Wilhelm was able to brief them on some of the basics of living and working in China. It is nevertheless more than possible that the contemporary social and political realities of the situation in Shanghai, the extent to which the city had become a cultural melting pot, and indeed the way in which it had become a magnet for international espionage, only became apparent to the couple once they arrived in their new home-city.
Architect Shanghai was riding a construction boom in which Rudolf Hamburger was able to participate fully. He found his SMC employment better paid than his private work, and he found that his monthly salary was 50 Taels higher than that of other architects employed by the Public Works Department. This was explained as compensation for the fact that he had been obliged to pay his own travel costs for the passage to China. However, when in April 1933 he opted to extend his contract, the differential was maintained although the differing treatment of those inter-continental travel costs had by that time been more than expunged. The renewed contract took effect in August 1933 after which Hamburger was the second-best architect employed by the council. Only C.H.Stableford, his department head, was paid more. This, according to his wife, may have reflected the international reputation of modernist German architecture at the time. (Most of his colleagues in the architecture department were from England.) Hamburger's own approach was strongly influenced by his old teacher, Hans Poelzig.
In Shanghai, Rudolf Hamburger produced four large buildings and several smaller ones. There were also a very large number of interior designs and examples of furniture design. The interiors were in part produced by the firm he set up and ran in parallel with his work for the council, "The Modern Home". In addition to the buildings for which he is known to have been directly responsible, scholars detect Hamburger's influence in other contemporary developments, such as the Chengdu Road police station.