Andreas Gottschalk

Cologne Workers' Association Early socialism 1815–1849 ○ Died of cholera

Cologne doctor of the poor who founded and led the Cologne Workers' Association and clashed with Marx over its course

Born in 1815 into a Jewish family in Düsseldorf, he studied medicine at Bonn and from 1840 practised in Cologne, treating mostly poorer patients, often free of charge. He converted to Protestantism in 1844. Influenced by Moses Hess, he was one of the founders of the Cologne community of the Communist League before 1848. He organised the mass meeting outside Cologne city hall on 3 March 1848 and was arrested, and after his release he was elected president of the Cologne Workers' Association on 13 April. He left the League in early May, was arrested again in July and acquitted by a jury, and denounced Marx, who had meanwhile taken over the Association, as a "learned sun-god". During the cholera epidemic in Cologne in the summer of 1849 he caught the disease while caring for poor patients and died on 8 September.