2023-08-18 12:51:24
Bloodthirsty dictators can be assured of attention even after their deaths. For example Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Walter Ulbricht was also a dictator. But another. For more than two decades he steered the fortunes of the GDR with an iron fist. And with the construction of the Wall, this most absurd state that ever existed on German soil was turned into a closed institution for almost three decades. In the few books to date that have dealt with him seriously, he is regarded as a soulless apparatchik, a small footnote in German history.
also read
That must have bothered and annoyed the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, who was born in East Germany in 1967. The starting point of the first part of his monumental Ulbricht biography is: Whoever dismisses Ulbricht, the most successful communist in German history, is making it too easy for himself. He wants to correct and adjust the common Ulbricht picture. He wants to do justice to what is remembered as a caricature. The biography goes back to 1945. One can look forward to the second volume, which is due to appear next year. He will cover the years in which Walter Ulbricht switched from endless planning to doing.
A double-volume Ulbricht biography is a remarkable, bold approach for an author not suspected of sympathizing with the communist legacy or East Germany. The execution is only partially convincing, in the end Kowalczuk confirms the well-known Ulbricht verdict. The book, which is easy to read and free of academic style, is still exciting and, above all, instructive. Because the author embeds Ulbricht’s life in the history of left-wing dreams, longings, errors, madness and crimes. That is the real subject of this biography.
From carpenter to apparatchik
Nobody is born a blockhead. Walter Ulbricht, son of a tailor, was born in Leipzig in 1893. Following his father’s example, he turned to the Social Democratic Party at a young age. And believes in their promise that capitalism is moving towards socialism and the liberation of the working class with natural logic. The young Ulbricht is extremely inquisitive, attends training courses, reads classic literature from Homer to Heine, and delves into the history of Belgium and the Netherlands, for example. After an apprenticeship as a carpenter, he hit the road, went as far as Venice, and was enchanted by Switzerland and its history of freedom.
Until then, nothing special: Like thousands of others, Ulbricht embodies the working classes’ desire for advancement and recognition. Totally following the bourgeois ideal of German social democracy: knowledge should lead to power and freedom. Only in one thing is he different back then: He is his own, doesn’t let himself be seen in the cards. And comes to a conviction he will never let go of: that the struggle for socialism and communism is not a matter of new ideas, but a question of organization. Not even 20 years old, Ulbricht took on his first party functions and soon became the leader of the KPD in Thuringia.
These membership cards from Walter Ulbricht from the KPD and SED ended up in an auction house years ago
Source: picture alliance / Christian Charisius/dpa
Much later, Ulbricht formulated his credo as follows: “Organization, organization and more organization”. However, it would be too easy to explain Ulbricht’s rigidity and stubbornness solely with his nature. Kowalczuk starts from the great shock experience of the German left, which accelerated the path of Ulbricht and many others into hopeless dogmatism: the First World War. What is often overlooked: The First World War also dealt a severe blow to the socialist left. German Social Democracy agreed to the war credits, became a national, patriotic party. The vision of the socialist international crumbled. After 1917, the Social Democrats rightly accused the Communists of aiming to establish a dictatorship. And the communists hit a sore point when they accused German social democracy of failing to overthrow the old elites in 1918/19. The socialist schism damaged both sides.
Walter Ulbricht opted for the dogmatic, communist path, which seemed to be more consistent to him and others. It is one of the mysteries of communism that this found enthusiastic followers, although or because it was a completely self-contained doctrine that did not admit of doubt and criticism. Like hardly anyone else, Ulbricht sought out this total political and intellectual torpor. And, paradoxically, it was precisely this ultra-dogmatism that helped him break through all the schisms, intrigues and purges.
They called him “Kartothekowitsch”
Kowalczuk impressively describes Ulbricht’s strengths. The arch-communist had a phenomenal memory, was always well prepared, recorded everything – which is why he was nicknamed “Kartothekowitsch”. The ascetic non-smoker was endlessly diligent. He wrote appeals, strategy papers, circulars and leaflets without a break. His most important weapon, says Kowalczuk, was the word. But the dry, unexperienced, stamped word of the dreary party language. The author attests to Ulbricht’s “high social intelligence”. Perhaps it’s better to say: he was always on the quivive, watching party friends as if they were enemies. Was always a move or two ahead of everyone and anticipated the new course changes in Moscow early on. A bureaucratic, unswerving survivor.
Walter Ulbricht did not study the writings of Marx, Lenin and then Stalin like books, but like primers, like instructions. Although he thought as schematically as few others, he always saw himself at the forefront of the fight against “schematism”. Marxism-Leninism was a doctrine of salvation; few believed in its end-time validity as firmly and rigidly as Ulbricht. That sounds crazy today, but offered the believer the delights of dogmatism: before a question could even be formulated, the answer was already there.
also read
Beautiful, sporty, nonconformist
To move in this world was a high art. Ulbricht mastered them. No lie, no infamy was too remote: thanks to social democracy, the Weimar Republic was not worth defending because it was fascist. The persecution of the Jews was initially seen by the KPD as a “diversionary tactic” (!). And a month after the Reichspogromnacht, Ulbricht announced: “The Jewish pogroms are an expression of the weakness of fascism.” With the Marxist-Leninist teachings in his luggage, Ulbricht was able to present truth as lies and lies as truth. An almost nihilistic attitude. Which helped him, as Kowalczuk describes in detail, to survive the notorious “Hotel Lux” and all the Stalinist purges, even to emerge victorious from them.
With the patience of an angel and amazing knowledge of the sources, Kowalczuk reconstructs Walter Ulbricht’s life. Since he was a closed person, one learns little more personally about him than from earlier biographies: he liked to hike, was athletic, went skiing and ice skating, loved tennis, which is why he sent expensive tennis balls from the imperialist headquarters in London to Moscow in exile let. And he liked watching Chaplin films. He had an almost equal relationship with the three women in his life. But that’s it, the person doesn’t get more plastic.
This is how he was known later: Walter Ulbricht, 1961
Source: picture-alliance/ dpa/dpaweb
Because of a larynx disease, Ulbricht had a fistulous voice, which, combined with his heavy Saxon tongue, made him a stiff, awkward, often comical figure. In his effort not to follow the “recurring folklore” of the Ulbricht descriptions, the author deals with them very discreetly. However, he cannot avoid repeatedly quoting Ulbricht’s companions with statements that confirm the image Kowalczuk rejected as too simple: Apparatschik, stubborn, unteachable, cold.
Ulbricht’s life consisted of much intense, useless, underhand work. Long meetings, a protocol once covered more than 600 pages. But meetings that consisted almost entirely of line battles and intrigues. In which the real world didn’t appear at all. And they didn’t do anything either. Hardly anyone outside of these circling circles found out about this titanic work, for example, of the 6,900 copies of a communist exile newspaper, only twelve copies made it to Germany. It was a constant failure, everyone was bathing in the sea of fruitlessness and futility. This is where Kowalczuk’s book has one of its weaknesses: you don’t really want to know it that precisely, because it doesn’t teach anything in the long run.
Shorter would have been better
For long stretches, the book looks like an annotated inventory of communist assemblies and intrigues. Drastic cuts would have helped. They would have made room for a document appendix, from which one could have heard Ulbricht’s voice not only in short quotations – as is usually the case in the book – but also in detail, in a way in the original sound.
It is also a pity that – apart from the communist publisher Willi Münzenberg and a few others – all companions, allies and opponents apart from Ulbricht remain completely pale. In this way, no panorama is created, no living environment becomes visible. Ulbricht was in contact with everyone: with the left-wing radical Ruth Fischer; with the proletarian, neither particularly clever nor particularly industrious KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann; with the writer Heinrich Mann, whom Ulbricht wanted to recruit in 1936 as the figurehead of a Popular Front initiative; with the later East German President Wilhelm Pieck; or with captured Wehrmacht soldiers, whom Ulbricht tried, sometimes successfully, to win for the cause of socialism. They all appear, but only as phantoms, not as flesh-and-blood people. How the book moves almost exclusively in the triangle of socialism-communism-national socialism. As if that was the whole world. The Center Party is only very marginal, the liberal parties of the Weimar Republic not at all. And neither did the varied, rugged intellectual landscape of those years.
also read
People who later turned away from communism and judged Ulbricht almost always come off badly with Kowalczuk. He usually attaches the label “renegade” to them, which the word “dissident” is sometimes substituted for later in the book. The renegade is an apostate. And one whose motive, as Kowalczuk suggests, is not the desire for enlightenment, but revenge. Renegades are, the author quotes Hannah Arendt, often just “reversed communists”.
This certainly does not apply to the publicist Carola Stern, who was enthusiastic about Hitler as a teenager, joined the SED after the war and fled to West Berlin in 1951. Since living in the Federal Republic, she, now a social democrat, has repeatedly dealt with the turmoil and totalitarian temptations of the 20th century. In 1963 she wrote the first published in the Federal Republic Ulbricht biography. Kowalczuk claims that she is spreading the well-known negative generalizations about Ulbricht: uneducated, unimaginative, lacking in originality, without format. But Carola Stern doesn’t do that at all. She expressly certifies that Ulbricht is not an opportunist and that his conversion from the SPD to the KPD was based on conviction.
Carola Stern’s book, which is still worth reading today, contains a number of things that Kowalczuk, in his whoops-now-here-I-come-way, passes off as the latest craze. If in the end Ulbricht appears to be rather mediocre in Carola Stern’s work, it’s probably because he really was. Because his story is a bleak one. One might almost say: a successfully wasted life. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk’s large-scale Ulbricht’s “rescue of honour” gets lost in the gray fog of a great many and often all too powerful words, despite numerous sensible and insightful passages.
Ilko-Sascha Kovalchuk: Walter Ulbricht. The German Communist (1893–1945). CH Beck, 1006 pages, 58 euros.
#WalterUlbricht #saving #honor #GDR #state #born #blockhead