Inge Marszolek (1947–2016)

‘We always got our faces smashed, but we definitely had the better analysis’ – that’s how our PhD supervisor Inge Marszolek often summed up her time in a Trotskyite splinter group in 1970s West Berlin. Even though she soon gave up her Trotskyism, it was surely no coincidence that we heard this phrase time and time again. Her insistence on critical analysis remained formative for her work as an academic and professor at the University of Bremen, first in the department of history and later in the department of cultural studies. Inge, who passed away on 12 August 2016, always emphasized the virtue of the better argument and she was willing to fight for this view.

Her academic career bears witness to this open-mindedness and her readiness to explore new paths. She studied history with romance languages and literature, first at the University of Bochum and then later in West Berlin, where she lived through the aftershocks of the 1968 protests and became an ardent Trotskyist. Yet while she often and passionately recounted this time of her life, she never glorified the generation of 68. Although her political convictions were shaped by these experiences, she also saw it as a period tainted by restrictions, delusions and confusions. As a witness bearing testimony, she remained critical towards her times as well as her own perceptions.

Her first academic publication, in 1975, was an article on the workers’ and soldiers’ council of Dortmund in the aftermath of the Great War, and shows her as a distinctly political scholar.¹ A year later followed an article on what was to become the topic of her PhD: the actions of the working-class movement in the post-World War II Ruhr area.² This was to remain her last publication for eight years to come, during which Inge followed a different path. She got married, gave up her city life for rural idyll, became a school-teacher and the mother of a daughter and a son. Only the nagging complaints of her PhD supervisor Reinhard Rürup and the feeling of being hemmed in by her rural environment finally led her to submit her doctoral thesis in the early 1980s at the Technische Universität Berlin, and it was published in 1983.³ In her study, she looked at the actions and the conduct of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Communist Party (KPD) and the unions in three cities of the Bergisches Land from 1945–48. Her focus was on the organizational attempts at to rebuild the German labour movement and on how ideas about the political-economic restructuring increasingly diverged. She came to the conclusion that the conflict of interests between

those concerned to rebuild traditional structures (parties and unions) on the one hand, and the more spontaneous, but isolated antifascist groups on the other were formative for the post-war era. Joining the tools of both social and political history as well as local, microhistory she was moreover breaking with the historical approach that focused on the formal political organisation still championed by most German historians.

With her move to Bremen in the early 1980s she also began a lasting friendship and collegial relationship with Hans-Josef Steinberg,⁴ who from 1971 onwards held the newly established chair of the history of the working class and its theories as well as of European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and who served as rector of Bremen University from 1974–7. He was behind Inge taking up Bremen’s history during the Third Reich as a research topic in the following years, by winning her over as a researcher for the project ‘Resistance and Persecution under National Socialism in Bremen 1933–45’, which was financed by Bremen’s senate. The highlight of this highly productive and creative phase for Inge was the publication, together with René Ott, of a monograph entitled Bremen in the Third Reich, which remains the classic study on the subject.⁵ While its main focus is on the history of the working...