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Weimar Republic and Nazi Era in East German Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Andreas Dorpalen
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Communist countries are notably history-minded. Since they see mankind as advancing toward socialism and communism as part of a law-determined historical process, they base their legitimacy in large part on historical antecedents. East Germany, being faced with the opposing claims of West Germany, has been particularly concerned with establishing its historical legitimacy. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) traces its roots back into a distant past, along a road on which medieval peasant risings, socioreligious upheavals, Reformation and Peasants' War, the War of Liberation against Napoleon I, and the revolutions of 1848 and 1918 stand as significant milestones. Perhaps no Communist leadership ever did its homework in history more thoroughly prior to its assumption of power than did the East German leaders. From the mid-1930s on, in their Moscow exile, they devoted considerable attention to the exploration of historical questions from the Marxist perspective; later, Marxist historians and Communist party officials began drawing up plans for historical study programs, textbooks, and monographs in preparation for the day when they would be able to take over power in Germany. They knew it would be important to prepare the way “historically,” too, for the transformation of Germany from a capitalist into a socialist society.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 1978 , pp. 211 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1978

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References

A somewhat briefer version of this paper was read at the History Forum of Georgetown University on October 10, 1975.

1. This is still not generally known. For East Germany see [Marion Gräfin] D[önho]ff, “Geschichtslos,” Die Zeit, Mar. 8, 1974; Ellen Lentz, “East Berlin Sees Drama on Hitler,” New York Times, June 22, 1975, who both claim that East Germans ignore all history prior to 1945.

2. The terms “socialist” and “communist” are used in the Marxist sense in this paper, describing socioeconomic orders in which private property in the means of production has been abolished, while goods and services are available at first only according to work done (socialism), but ultimately according to needs (communism).

3. Berthold, Werner, Marxistisches Geschichtsbild: Volksfront und antifaschistisch-demokratische Revolution (Berlin [East], 1970).Google Scholar

4. On the role of the historian in the GDR see the exchange of letters between the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party and the Fifth Congress of GDR Historians, in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (cited as ZfG) 21 (1973): 269–71; also Dorpalen, Andreas, “The Role of History in the DDR,” East Central Europe 3 (1976): 58ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Documentation will be kept here to a minimum, but will be provided in a comprehensive study, “Marxism and History: East German Interpretations of German History,” which I am preparing at present. The works most readily available on which this paper has drawn are Streisand, Joachim, Deutsche Geschichte in einem Band (Berlin [East], 1974)Google Scholar; Ruge, Wolfgang, Deutschland von 1917 bis 1933 (Berlin [East], 1967)Google Scholar; Paterna, Erich et al. , Deutschland von 1933 bis 1939 (Berlin [East], 1969)Google Scholar; Bleyer, Wolfgang et al. , Deutschland von 1939 bis 1945 (Berlin [East], 1969)Google Scholar; Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party, ed., Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (cited as GdA) (Berlin [East], 1966); Sachwörterbuch der Geschichte Deutschlands und der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (cited as Swb) (Berlin [East], 1969–1970).Google Scholar

6. Berthold, pp. 86ff.; also the debate carried on in ZfG 5 (1957) – 6 (1958).

7. See Soviet memorandum of June 7,1925, in Ruge, Wolfgang, ed., Locarno-Konferenz 1925 (Berlin [East], 1962), pp. 94ffGoogle Scholar. (quotation on p. 95). In his own commentary Ruge ignores this crucial document. Germany's League membership of course worried the Kremlin also for other reasons.

8. This conclusion is also borne out by the data presented in Angress, Werner T., Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany (Princeton, 1963).Google Scholar

9. The characterization of Nazism as a tool of “finance capitalism” has occasionally been challenged by dissident Marxists such as August Thalheimer, Karl Radek, Heinz Neumann, and Hermann Remmele. For an earlier challenge of this thesis, although not specifically aimed at it, by the Soviet philosopher Alexander Bogdanov, see Cohen, Stephen A., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York, 1973), pp. 143–44.Google Scholar A more recent modification can be found in Galkin, A. A., Sotsiologiya neofashizma (Moscow, 1971), p. 41.Google Scholar

10. This is pointed out also by some West German historians; cf. Winkler, Heinrich August, “Unternehmerverbände zwischen Ständeideologie und Nationalsozialismus,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (cited as VfZ) 17 (1969): 367ff.Google Scholar; discussion, in Mommsen, Hans et al. , eds., Industrielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1974), pp. 944–45Google Scholar. On the continuity aspect, see also Bracher, Karl Dietrich, “Brünings unpolitische Politik und die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik,” VfZ 19 (1971): 119–20.Google Scholar

11. On this see also the well-documented essay by Ruge, “Die ‘Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung’ und die Brüning-Regierung: Zur Rolle der Grossbourgeoisie bei der Vorbereitung des Faschismus,” ZfG 16 (1968): 19ff.

12. Thus they consider the continued attacks on the Social Democrats as the “social mainstay” of the bourgeoisie as self-defeating. Similarly they condemn as a grave mistake the Communist participation, in 1931, in the Stahlhelm- and Nazi-sponsored referendum which called for the removal of the Braun-Severing government in Prussia.

13. Karl, Heinz, ed., Die Antifaschistische Aktion (Berlin [East], 1965), pp. 17*–18*Google Scholar; Kücklich, Erika, “Streik gegen Notverordnungen: Zur Gewerkschafts- und Streikpolitik der KPD gegen die staatsmonopolistische Offensive der Regierung Papen im Sommer und Herbst 1932,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 13 (1971): 454Google Scholar. GDR scholars also reject Western charges that the KPD considered the advent of Nazism inevitable and in fact welcomed it as a prelude to a proletarian revolution. They attribute such views, without any substantiating documentation, to Heinz Neumann, a dissident party leader, and his associates who were removed from their party posts in 1932. The statements generally quoted in the West as substantiating the “inevitability” charges either do not make this point or are of dubious authenticity; see the imprecise and purely speculative discussion of this issue in Duhnke, Horst, Die KPD von 1933 bis 1945 (Cologne, 1972), pp. 27–28Google Scholar and nn. 52–53, pp. 35–36 and n. 89.

14. See, for example, Paterna et al., pp. 32–33.

15. Schweitzer, Arthur, Big Business in the Third Reich (Bloomington, Ind., 1964), pp. 250ff.Google Scholar, is an exception.

16. Klein, Fritz, “Stand und Probleme der Erforschung der Geschichte des deutschen Imperialismus bis 1945,” ZfG 23 (1975): 488ff.Google Scholar

17. Swb, 1: 571.

18. Ernst Stenzel, in Kommission der Historiker der DDR und der UdSSR, ed., Der deutsche Imperialismus und der zweite Weltkrieg (Berlin [East], 1961), 3: 290–91Google Scholar; Swb, 2: 670–72. The Battle of Britain is ignored in Streisand, p. 388; GdA, 5: 271, 275. For a slightly differentiated view see now Klassenkampf, Tradition, Sozialismus (Berlin [East], 1974). p. 468.Google Scholar

19. Eichholtz, Dietrich, Geschichte der deutschen Kriegswirtschaft (Berlin [East], 1969), 1: 207Google Scholar; Klein, p. 488.

20. Streisand, p. 395; Bleyer et al., p. 414.

21. Drobisch, Klaus et al. , Juden unterm Hakenkreuz (Frankfurt a.M., 1973), pp. 274ff.Google Scholar

22. Benser, Günter, “Das deutsche Volk und die Siegermächte,” ZfG 20 (1972): 140ff.Google Scholar; Ernst Diehl, “Die Geschichte des deutschen Volkes im welthistorischen Prozess,” ibid. 21 (1973): 284–85. That the GDR leadership had considerable difficulties in persuading East Germans to see postwar Soviet activities in East Germany in this light is evident from the subject matter of a paper, recently presented at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, on the “ideological struggle of the [Socialist Unity Party] to teach the masses, after the Third Party Congress [held in July 1950], to embrace proletarian internationalism and feel friendship toward the Soviet Union.” See the notice ibid. 26 (1978): 161.

23. Engelberg, Ernst, “Über Gegenstand und Ziel der marxistisch-leninistischen Geschichtswissenschaft,” ZfG 16 (1968): 1143.Google Scholar For details see Dorpalen (above, n. 4), pp. 59–60, 65ff.

24. Summing up the work done on the German crisis of 1923, two GDR scholars note: “All … studies dealing with problems of the German workers movement in 1923 are characterized by the endeavor, based on voluminous source materials, to arrive at new insights concerning the problems arising on the road to power.” Karl, Heinz and Ruge, Wolfgang, in ZfG 18 (1970), suppl., p. 525.Google Scholar