Ernst Engelberg

Ernst Engelberg (5 April 1909 – 18 December 2010) was a German university professor and Marxist historian.

He made a particularly noteworthy contribution with his two-volume biography of Otto von Bismarck which in the view of at least one commentator represented a paradigm shift for historiography in the German Democratic Republic.

Life

Provenance

Ernst Engelberg was born into a family with well documented democratic revolutionary credentials. His grandfather Julius Engelberg (1829-1902) had taken to calling himself "von Engelberg" and joined a citizens' militia in the aftermath of 1848. Ernst Engelberg's father, (1862-1947), was a publisher and a left-wing activist, who in 1898 had founded the local Social Democratic Party association in Haslach. The family was politically aware, and even as an old man Wilhelm Engelberg delighted to proclaim himself a "democrat of 1848" (''"Ich bin 48er Demokrat"'').

Early years

Following a childhood that encouraged political questioning, and which was overshadowed by war, post war political turmoil, and the economic disaster of the 1920s inflation, Engelberg found himself propelled towards the Young Communists, which he joined in 1928, and the Communist Party which he joined following his 21st birthday, two years later. His university studies took him between 1927 and 1934 to the Universities of Freiburg (briefly), Munich and Berlin, where one of his tutors was Gustav Mayer. In addition to History, he studied Social Economics (''Nationalökonomie''), Philosophy and Jurisprudence. His doctoral dissertation was produced under the supervision of Hermann Oncken and, later, Fritz Hartung: it was concerned with Social Democracy in Germany and Chancellor Bismarck's social policy. By the time his dissertation was completed, however, in 1934, régime change had come to Germany, and his old history tutor, Gustav Mayer (who was Jewish), had been sacked from his university posts and persuaded to emigrate to (at this stage) the Netherlands. Ernst Engelberg's turned out to be one of very few doctorates awarded for a Marxist dissertation under the Third Reich.

Writing more than eight decades later, Engelberg's son commended the independence demonstrated by the Humboldt University scholars awarding Ernst Engelberg his doctorate in defiance of the known political preferences of the ruling party. A few days after the traditional ceremony held on 22 February 1934 in which Engelberg orally defended his work before a committee of examiners Nemesis followed, however. On the evening 26 February he was arrested, and faced the régime's usual charge in such cases: Conspiracy to Commit High Treason. He faced trial, with others, on 17 October 1934 and was sentenced to an eighteen-month term, which he spent in the prison at Luckau. He later told his son that he had considered himself lucky: if the Nazis had known that Engelberg was the Communist Party student leader identified with the cover name "Alfred", his sentence would have been spent not in a prison but in a concentration camp.

Exile

On his release, in 1936 Engelberg fled to Switzerland. Here, following advice received from Gustav Mayer, he applied to and was accepted by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, from whom he now received a stipendium. He also became a member of the recently established Geneva branch of the Institute for Social Research, where fellow academic luminaries in exile included Hans Mayer, Hans Kelsen and Max Horkheimer. He had contacts with the Movement for a Free Germany.

In 1940. thanks to the contacts of Max Horkheimer he was able to emigrate to Turkey. Between 1940 and 1947 he worked as a lecturer at Istanbul University. He tried without success to obtain permission to emigrate to the United States or Cuba. The war ended in May 1945, but Engelberg, like many, encountered what sources term bureaucratic delays in attempting to return to what remained of Germany. In the end he succeeded in returning to Germany via Italy and Switzerland early in 1948, which was too late to renew his relationship with his father, Wilhelm Engelberg, who had died the previous year. The part of Germany to which he returned was in 1948 still administered as the Soviet occupation zone, which later, in October 1949, was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic, a new Soviet sponsored German state which was administratively configured according to Soviet precepts, and in which for the next forty years, Ernst Engelberg pursued a successful academic career. On arriving in 1948 he lost little time in joining the newly formed SED (party) which in due course became the ruling party of this new East German state.

The German Democratic Republic

In east Germany took a teaching post at the Teaching Academy (''"Pädagogische Hochschule"'') in Potsdam (subsequently subsumed into the University of Potsdam). The next year, 1949, Ernst Engelberg was appointed Professor for the "History of the German Labour Movement" at Leipzig University, where colleagues included Hans Mayer (an old comrade from their time in Geneva), Ernst Bloch and Walter Markov, along with Werner Krauß, Wieland Herzfelde and Hermann Budzislawski. In 1951 he was appointed Director of Leipzig's newly established Institute for the History of the German People (''" Institut für Geschichte des dt. Volkes"''), a post he held till 1960. Research concentrated on the revolutionary Social Democracy Movement during the second half of the nineteenth century, and on the movement's leading figures such as August Bebel, Friedrich Engels

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