Albert Schreiner (historian)

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Albert Schreiner (born August 7, 1892 in Aglasterhausen , † August 4, 1979 in Berlin ) was a German historian .

Life

The son of an SPD functionary became a SPD member in 1910 and belonged to the left wing there. During the First World War he was with the Spartakusbund , then a founding member of the KPD . He played an important role in Stuttgart in the November Revolution of 1918 . On November 9, 1918, he became minister of war in the first revolutionary government of the free people's state of Württemberg . Because the Spartakusbund in Stuttgart, under the leadership of Fritz Rück and August Thalheimer, refused to participate in the government, Schreiner was withdrawn from Blos' cabinet on November 15 for reasons of principle .

Until 1922 he was an employed functionary of the KPD in Württemberg. He participated as a delegate at the 4th World Congress of the Comintern . In 1923 he worked in the KPD's military apparatus and was then involved in the Hamburg uprising as M-head of the Wasserkante district . In 1924 he attended the military college in Moscow and in the same year became one of the leaders of the newly founded Red Front Fighters Union (RFB) and editor-in-chief of its organ, the Red Front . In 1927 he was delegated to the 11th party congress of the KPD in Essen.

In the corruption affair around Willy Leow (second chairman of the RFB) he took a critical position. Schreiner, dubbed the so-called KPD “right wing” at this time, lost all functions in the RFB and was expelled from the KPD in 1929. He joined the Communist Party Opposition (KPO) around Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer , worked on Gegen den Strom , the KPO's theoretical organ, and was a member of both the Berlin district leadership and the Reich leadership of the organization. In October 1932, Schreiner unexpectedly left the KPO and rejoined it after criticism from his local group. Brandler resisted his resumption.

In 1933 Schreiner emigrated to France and again became a member of the KPD, then was secretary of the Thälmann Committee and during the Spanish Civil War Chief of Staff of the XIII. International Brigade . After the defeat in 1939 he fled to Morocco and was interned there. In 1941, on the way to Mexico, he was detained in the USA. In New York he made friends with Oskar Maria Graf . He stayed there until 1946. As in France, he wrote military and historical novels. In 1942 he was one of the co-founders of the " German American Emergency Conference " and in 1944 one of the co-founders of the " Council for a Democratic Germany (CDG)".

At the end of 1946 he returned to Germany, joined the SED in 1946 and became a professor at the University of Leipzig in 1947 , later dean of the university's social science faculty. Schreiner published various books. From 1950 he was head of department at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of the Central Committee of the SED. In 1950/52 there was a campaign in the SED against former KPO members. The ZPKK was the instrument for its implementation . He was briefly ostracized because of his former KPO function. In 1952 he became head of the “1918–1945” department at the Museum of German History and in 1956 head of the “1918–1945” department at the Institute for History of the German Academy of Sciences . In 1960 he retired.

In 1952 Schreiner was awarded the National Prize of the GDR , in 1962 with the Karl Marx Order , in 1967 with the Patriotic Order of Merit , in 1972 with the Gold Medal for the Patriotic Order of Merit and in 1977 with the Star of Friendship of Nations . In 1986 a street in Berlin-Hellersdorf was named after him (since 1992 Ernst-Bloch-Straße).

Albert Schreiner, together with a small group of like-minded people, pushed ahead with the orientation of the historical institutes in the GDR according to the SED guidelines. The "guild" of GDR historians was initially by no means in the Marxist tradition. According to Lothar Mertens , Schreiner - similar to Horst Bartel , Walter Bartel , Karl Bittel and Rudolf Lindau - lacked the technical competence, so that he was even regarded within the party as a pure propagandist, along with the others mentioned.

tomb

His urn was in the grave conditioning Pergolenweg the memorial of the socialists at the Berlin Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde buried.

Fonts

22 publications including

  • German social democracy. Fourteen years in league with capital , Berlin, 1928 (together with Paul Frölich )
  • Hitler Drifts to War , 1934, co-author, edited by Dorothy Woodman
  • Hitler's air fleet ready to go! , Edited by Dorothy Woodman in 1935
  • Hitler's motorized shock army, army and economic motorization in the Third Reich, 1936 under the pseudonym Albert Müller
  • From total war to total defeat of Hitler A critical examination of the Wehrmacht ideology of the Third Reich. Paris 1939
  • The Lesson of Germany. A guide to her history . New York 1945 (together with Albert Norden and Gerhart Eisler )
  • On the history of German foreign policy, 1871–1945. Vol 1. 1871-1918. From the unification of the empire to the November revolution . Berlin 1952
  • Revolutionary events and problems in Germany during the period of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917/1918. Contributions to the 40th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution . Berlin 1957

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "To the friend and fellow campaigner Albert Schreiner, Oskar M Graf NYC December 7, 1943." Dedication in: Anton Sittinger . Novel . Self-published, New York 1941 (quoted in: Antiquariat Seidel & Richter, Fürstenberg / Havel 2017. Catalog 90 , No. 226, p. 23.)
  2. ^ Lothar Mertens: Priest of the Klio or court chronicler of the party? Collective biographical analyzes of the GDR historians , V & R unipress, Göttingen 2006, p. 125, ISBN 3-89971-307-9 .
personal data
SURNAME Carpenter, Albert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schindler, Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Marxist historian
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Aglasterhausen
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 1979
Place of death Berlin