Hitler’s Rival: Ernst Thälmann in Myth and Memory

7. "Ernst Thalmann Is Still among Us"

277 7 “Ernst Thälmann Is Still among Us” Because the governing SED based its legitimacy on the legacy of antifascism , presented as a dramatic narrative that took the form of myth, the study of contemporary history from a Marxist–Leninist perspective played a vital role in East German political propaganda. Scholars in the GDR developed a highly didactic historiography— Geschichtspropaganda, “historical propaganda”—that came to play a critical part in the development of the antifascism myth. East German historians played an active role in creating the legitimacy that their government sought, and their profession made many of them instruments of the ruling SED. They were not mere erudite observers of past events, but active participants in the shaping of the socialist present and the Communist future. Like scholars in other Marxist–Leninist states, GDR historians recorded, explained, and encouraged the ineluctable march of class conflict that had culminated in the creation of the German Democratic Republic and that would one day assure the global victory of communism . The historians’ goal was, as Karl Marx said of philosophers, not merely “to explain the world, but to change it.” Their calling was a moral and political one, and they rejected the spurious notion of “objectivity” in favor of participation in the struggle to liberate the proletariat, to link the past, present, and future along an ideologically predetermined continuum . In other words, GDR scholars were to write what Friedrich Nietzsche called “monumental history” designed to help build the myths necessary to the dissemination of the socialist worldview, rather than the “critical history” to which Western bourgeois scholars supposedly ascribed. In order to promote this functionalist East German historiography and thereby contribute to its quest for legitimacy, the SED created scholarly academies such as the Institute for Marxism–Leninism (IML, founded in 1957) and the Central Institute for History. Scholars 278 HITLER’S RIVAL working at these institutions as well as at East German universities generated an enormous quantity of historical propaganda , and the IML became especially important to the dissemination of the antifascism myth. Historians produced their work not for other scholars, as was often the case in the West, but for the masses, who needed to be educated in the fundamental principles of Marxism–Leninism. As a result, journals such as the Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (Contributions to the History of the Workers’ Movement) published scholarly articles on labor history written from a Marxist–Leninist perspective. State-controlled publishers, most important among them being Dietz Verlag, printed and distributed collections from the writings of important socialist thinkers, scholarly monographs, and party histories designed to contribute to the task of historical propaganda.1 Although the GDR’s Marxist–Leninist historians insisted that social classes made history and, in theory, deemphasized the necessity of “great men,” biographical works played an important role in historical propaganda. Great figures from the socialist past—including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Nikolai Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht —could serve as models of the proper way to organize and lead the masses, the true creators of historical change. These figures from the past came to represent the socialist archetype, and scholars participated in the development of cults of personality surrounding them. Such historical personalities came to embody the ideals of socialist humanism, the forces of progress in history. The GDR was, according to the Marxist–Leninist biographers, the embodiment of these figures’ political struggle. As such, their legacy served to legitimize socialist Germany.2 Lenin and, at least until the mid-1950s, Stalin remained the most important figures around whom historians from the Soviet bloc fostered the growth of personality cults. It should come as no surprise, however, that Thälmann became a central figure in the German socialists ’ historical propaganda, first in the SBZ and then in the GDR. Over the course of the years from 1948 to 1989, numerous books and journal articles, many written by academic historians, chronicled the life of the fallen KPD chief. An analysis of these works provides another fruitful opportunity to understand the evolution of the Ernst Thälmann myth over the course of four decades. For the sake of brevity, I concentrate on the two most important books written about Thälmann during these years: Willi Bredel’s Ernst Thälmann: Ein Beitrag zu einem politischen Leb- “Ernst Thälmann Is Still among Us” 279 ensbild (Ernst Thälmann: A Contribution to a Political View of...