“A book that fits into the discussion about GDR and communism”

2023-07-15 11:31:05
HomeCultureUlbricht biography: “A book that fits into the discussion about GDR and communism”

Walter Ulbricht is considered the embodiment of evil. According to historian Rainer Eckert, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk’s biography could change this view forever.

Historian Rainer EckertBenjamin Pritzkuleit

In the three decades since the Peaceful Revolution, the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk has written standard works on the popular uprising of 1953, the 1989/90 revolution and the transformation in the East from 1990 onwards. Now the first volume of the Walter Ulbricht biography follows – and with it the most comprehensive scientific description of the communist revolutionary and party leader to date. A monumental work that can, indeed must, be read as a history of world communism and the German Communist Party up to 1945.

Modest working-class family from Leipzig

The author’s attention to detail is a great asset. It was possible because over many years of work he developed his own relationship with the politician and discovered a new Ulbricht: well-read, modest, full of workaholism. Also, the German communist did not always agree with Soviet ideas, but dared not openly contradict them. Kowalczuk’s view also surprises me because even as a child the GDR functionary seemed to me to be the embodiment of evil. Others saw it the same way, and it remains to be seen whether Kowalczuk will change this view in the long term.

For the author, Walter Ulbricht is the most politically influential Leipziger. He grew up in a modest working-class family at the end of the 19th century, was an ambitious student, became a carpenter and was involved in social democracy. Like many workers, he wanted to take his fate into his own hands and learned early on to assert minority positions and to live against the mainstream.

Ulbricht rejected the First World War, this war made him a communist. He returned to Leipzig in 1918 and became a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party, the Spartacus League and the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. Whether the November Revolution was the most important event in Ulbricht’s life, as Kowalczuk believes, or whether it was the founding of the GDR in 1949, seems to me to remain open. In any case, Ulbricht went underground for the first time after the revolution was crushed and found that the failure was due to the lack of a Leninist cadre party. At the beginning of January 1919 he joined the KPD. Here he was able to prove his organizational skills and begin a career in a party that quickly became the most important outpost of Soviet, centrally organized communism.

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Head of the KPD district Berlin-Brandenburg

Ulbricht was considered a good speaker, his Saxon dialect only played a negative role in the later GDR. He loved the written word, and the implacable fight against the majority social democracy and left tendencies that did not submit to Moscow was a matter of course for him. In 1921 the communist became a paid party functionary and worked successfully on the Stalinization of the KPD. Part of the fixation on Moscow was a ruthless class struggle and the goal of eliminating democracy through revolution.

Ulbricht’s path led him from Leipzig to Thuringia, but also repeatedly to Moscow and then to the KPD headquarters in Berlin. After the failed uprising of the KPD in 1923, illegality and stays abroad followed again – most recently in the Soviet Union. In 1929 he returned to Germany and headed the KPD district of Berlin-Brandenburg until the end of 1932. The fight against National Socialism was added, with Kowalczuk rightly pointing out that the KPD and NSDAP had very similar views on certain issues.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, there were no insurrection plans in Ulbricht’s party, insufficient preparation for illegality, instead betrayals and arrests. Walter Ulbricht commuted between Paris, Prague and Moscow and had to defend himself against attacks by numerous “leading comrades”. As Kowalczuk describes it, the KPD functionaries fought each other to the death. Only the hatred of the “social fascists” of social democracy was even stronger.

Verlag C.H.Beck oHG

Walter Ulbricht

Was born in Leipzig in 1893 and died in East Berlin in 1973. He was Chairman of the Council of State of the GDR and General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, born in 1967, first heard his name when Ulbricht was already seriously ill. His father, a big Ulbricht fan, made a picture folder with Kowalczuk’s sister, which was sent to the head of state at his bedside. Ulbricht died a year later, but he did not disappear from Kowalcuk’s life, kept appearing in books and archives, aroused his curiosity until he decided to write a biography about him. To do this, the historian visited 60 archives in twelve countries and processed over 4,000 literature titles. The first volume of the Ulbricht biography, 1000 pages thick, was published by CH Beck Verlag on July 13, the second will follow in January 2024.

After the stabilization of National Socialist Germany in 1934/35 and the beginning of the “Great Terror” in the Soviet Union, international communism changed its policy towards social democracy. Now he offered the “social-fascists” a united front in the fight against fascism. This was followed by the goal of a popular front also with so-called bourgeois forces.

Kowalczuk writes that Ulbricht supported this, but in view of his previous attitude he probably “lied and falsified” more than he himself admitted. In addition, the reader learns a lot about the private life of the party leader in Moscow, the center of world communism. Here it was necessary to survive Stalin’s murderous actions and to join in the volatility of foreign policy – such as the 1939 German-Soviet non-aggression agreement with the secret additional protocol on the division of Central and Eastern Europe.

Leading KPD functionary in the summer of 1944

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 changed everything. Now it was about the ideological support of German prisoners of war, propaganda at the front and planning for the time after Hitler. In the summer of 1944, Ulbricht succeeded in becoming the leading KPD functionary. His ideas about a post-war Germany did not always agree with those of Moscow. Ulbricht wanted a socialist Germany, Stalin a democratic, anti-fascist state. Ulbricht was flexible enough to adapt. At the end of the first volume of the biography, it remains unclear what position he ultimately occupies in the story. But it is already clear that the book fits perfectly into the new discussion about the history of German communism and the GDR.