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	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

RED PROFESSOR

Peter Monteath Valerie Munt

The Cold War Life of Fred Rose

Fred Rose's life takes us through rip-roaring tales from Australia's northern frontier to enthralling intellectual tussles over kinship systems and political dramas as he runs rings around his Petrov inquisitors.

More than any other injustice, the abuse of Aborigines leads him into the Communist Party in 1942. His move to academic life in what he insisted on calling the German Democratic Republic made him a dissident against anthropological orthodoxies in the Soviet Bloc as he had been in Australia. Those final three decades also see his informing on his children to his Stasi handlers.

Out of relentless research, Peter Monteath and Valerie Munt present an engrossing portrait of the short twentieth century from Rose's birth during the Great War to his death in Berlin shortly after the Wall comes down. The result is unputdownable for its sweep of events while causing us to reflect on how someone can be heroic and horrendous, appalling and admirable.

Peter Monteath teaches History in the School of International Studies at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. He is also a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Valerie Munt is an Adjunct Lecturer in History in the School of International Studies at Flinders University.

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Book Published 2015-06-01 by Wakefield Press

Comments

Was Rose a spy? Colonel Spry of ASIO thought so, and Desmond Ball and other scholars of the Petrov affair have tentatively identified him as the Soviet informant/agent who went under the code name Professor' in the Venona transcripts ... How good an anthropologist he was remains unclear from this judicious and well-researched biography, but most other things the reader might want to know are in there. (Sheila Fitzpatrick)

Rose has been effectively written out of the intellectual history of Australia despite the emblematic nature of his fate. The anthropological establishment preserves practically no memory of his pioneering work on Groote Eylandt in the 1930s; the radical intelligentsia whose circles he once frequented have long since moved on from the concerns that shaped his life. There is a reason for this neglect, a single, all-dominating reason: the episode that lies at the heart of [this] subtle new biography ... (Nicolas Rothwell)