Arthur Rosenberg

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Arthur Rosenberg (born December 19, 1889 in Berlin , † February 7, 1943 in New York ) was a German Marxist historian and politician .

Life

Youth, training, academic career

Arthur Rosenberg was born in Berlin, where he also grew up - interrupted by the family moving to Vienna for a year and a half . His father was a merchant and came just as the mother from the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary belonging Rózsahegy (today Ruzomberok, Slovakia ). As a child of assimilated Jewish parents, Rosenberg was baptized Protestant. In 1907 he passed the Abitur examination at the Askanisches Gymnasium and then studied ancient history and classical philology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin . In 1911 he received his doctorate with the thesis investigations into the Roman constitution of the Centuries . Two years later, he completed his habilitation as an ancient historian with Eduard Meyer with the work The State of the Old Italians .

Since January 1914 Rosenberg was a private lecturer at the Berlin University; In 1918 he was in discussion for a professorship at the Karl Ferdinand University in Prague , which the appointment committee finally awarded to Arthur Stein after a narrow decision . By joining the USPD , but above all joining the KPD in 1920, Rosenberg became an academic pariah overnight. As a communist with venia legendi , he found himself in an “absolute outsider position”, which was even more precarious than the position of isolated social democratic university lecturers like Gustav Mayer . In February 1921, the Philosophical Faculty issued a severe reprimand to Rosenberg and threatened to withdraw his teaching license after he had campaigned for a student who had exposed the brothers Leonardo and Silvio Conti as Reichswehr informants and who then went to the Academic Senate had been reported for insult.

In 1921, Rosenberg's last major works on ancient history appeared with the introduction and source study on Roman history and the history of the Roman Republic . Neither book is Marxist either in terms of structure or reasoning. Rosenberg made the transition to an initially “relatively rough understanding of Marxism” only a few months later with the brochure Democracy and Class Struggle in Antiquity . In the following years he offered lectures and exercises at the Berlin University, which were a direct contrast to the lectures of his faculty colleagues, such as "The social struggles in ancient Rome", "The social requirements for the emergence of Christianity", " Socialism and Communism in Antiquity ”,“ The Ancient Economy ”.

In August 1930, three years after Rosenberg's resignation from the KPD, the Prussian minister of education, Adolf Grimme, pushed through his appointment as a non-official extraordinary professor against the opposition of the faculty. As such, Rosenberg became a point of reference for the few students who sympathized with the political left, including Walter Markov .

Rosenberg earned the majority of his living from 1931 as a study assistant at the Köllnisches Gymnasium , which was directed by the reform pedagogue Siegfried Kawerau . Here was Theodor Bergmann one of his students. He also had a teaching position at the German University of Politics .

In September 1933, the Prussian minister of education, Bernhard Rust , formally withdrew the license to teach from Rosenberg, who had already emigrated.

Political activity

Although Rosenberg came from a more nationally liberal milieu, had volunteered for military service in 1914 and, as a student of the conservative Eduard Meyer, showed no signs of affiliation with the socialist labor movement , he joined the USPD on November 10, 1918. The history and motives for this decision are largely in the dark. Until the beginning of November 1918, Rosenberg had maintained a close relationship with Meyer, who had joined the German Fatherland Party in 1917 . The received correspondence between the two does not reveal any political distance. From 1915 until its dissolution at the end of the war, Rosenberg worked in the war press office , the central censorship and propaganda office of the OHL . Rosenberg's namesake, Hans Rosenberg , with whom he became friends two decades later in American exile, pointed out in 1983 that Rosenberg was "obviously uncomfortable" with "talking about his work during the First World War". Eduard Meyer broke off contact with Rosenberg in 1919 after he published his first article in the USPD press.

In 1920 Rosenberg went with the left majority wing of the USPD to the KPD, for which he initially worked as a city ​​councilor in Berlin (1921-1924) and as foreign policy editor for the press service. Between February 1924 and July 1925, Rosenberg was a member of the Political Bureau of the KPD headquarters. In this phase he was initially close to the ultra-left Fischer - Maslow group and tried in 1925/26, together with Iwan Katz and Werner Scholem, to organize a current that propagated an even “left” line. In 1926, within a few months, Rosenberg switched to positions of the communist “right-wing”, finally gave up these too and left the KPD at the end of April 1927.

Since May 1924 Rosenberg was a member of the Reichstag for the KPD . After leaving the party, he did not comply with the party's request to hand over the mandate to a successor and was a member of parliament until 1928 as a non-party and non-party member. He worked in the committee for foreign affairs and was a member of the Reichstag committee, which dealt with the investigation of the causes of the defeat of the German Reich in the First World War .

After leaving the party, Rosenberg distanced himself from the communist labor movement. His History of Bolshevism , published in 1932, was also criticized by authors who, like him, had broken with the KPD. In a review for the Weltbühne, Paul Frölich confirmed that the book had serious deficits in argumentation and content, which would clearly demonstrate that Rosenberg “wandered through the KPD as a stranger”. Karl Retzlaw saw in Rosenberg one of those “young intellectuals” for whom the KPD had been a “transit station” in the revolutionary post-war crisis: “Since the ideological interest soon fell asleep, material interest could not be satisfied, and the burden of party membership was heavy, these people soon left the party. "

Rosenberg joined the German League for Human Rights around 1928 . He wrote every now and then for the left-wing social-democratic magazine Der Klassenkampf , but also for papers that represented the line of the SPD executive board, for example for Vorwärts , the social-democratic review magazine Die Bücherwarte and for Die Gesellschaft . He was used by the leadership of the Berlin SAJ in the educational work of the organization.

exile

After the handover of power to the NSDAP , Rosenberg and his family fled to Zurich at the end of March 1933 . In the autumn of the same year he was accepted into England, where he taught ancient history at the University of Liverpool from 1934 to 1937 . On February 1, 1937, the Nazi authorities revoked his German citizenship.

Under the pseudonym Historikus Rosenberg worked temporarily on the magazine for socialism , which was published by the Sopade . He also wrote for the New Forward and, after moving to the United States in October 1937, for The Nation . Rosenberg first worked as a tutor at Brooklyn College in New York, and since January 1941 as a permanent teacher. In the spring of 1942 he joined the German American Emergency Conference , founded by emigrants close to the KPD and chaired by Kurt Rosenfeld . The following year he succumbed to cancer.

plant

In addition to the ancient historical works and the history of Bolshevism (1932), which was translated into numerous languages, Rosenberg's reflections on basic problems in the history of the Empire and the Weimar Republic played a role in the historical debate.

In the study The Origin of the German Republic 1871–1918 (1928), Rosenberg described the Empire as a system of rule based on an unstable class compromise between the German bourgeoisie and the Prussian landowners . Between 1848 and 1871 the Prussian aristocracy “rejected the onslaught of bourgeois liberalism all along the line”, but at the same time understood that in the long term a complete exclusion of the economically growing bourgeoisie from power could not be sustained. Bismarck's policy consisted in preserving the conditions in Prussia, but giving the bourgeoisie in the empire a share in the mechanism of rule. However, this was not a real compensation, because according to Rosenberg, the Bismarckian constitution was “a constitution in which Prussia ruled the empire and not the other way around”. The imperial power center had neither a constitutional nor a traditional, but a Bonapartist foundation:

“Bismarck's Germany was neither a constitutional state nor an absolute monarchy with a solid tradition. The forces on which the empire rested had no organic connection. The balance between the Prussian military aristocracy and the other forces active in the empire lay solely in the hands of the regent. In this sense, Bismarck's empire was a Bonapartist creation, and its weal and woe depended to a large extent on the person of the ruler, be it the ruling emperor or a ruling chancellor. "

In addition, the constitution established a latent dualism between civil and military power by withdrawing the army, which was already controlled by the Prussian nobility, from all civilian access. During the war, constitutional Bonapartism ceased to function, and since 1916 the empire had been a “pure military dictatorship”.

Rosenberg assessed the political content of the November Revolution not as socialist, but as bourgeois-democratic. The "period of bourgeois democracy" did not begin in Germany with the revolution, but with the October reform "ordered by Ludendorff " and the Chancellorship of Max von Baden . The revolution that started against the resistance of the SPD was - not only in terms of its result - superfluous (the “strangest of all revolutions”), because it merely removed the monarchical facade, which had already become ineffective; But the majority of its supporters had no other goal in mind than the parliamentary democracy that had already been realized. The Council of People's Representatives was "in reality (...) [only] a somewhat socialistly veiled rule of the old Reichstag majority", "supplemented by the right wing of the USPD". In his History of the German Republic (1935), Rosenberg subsequently rejected the view that the “threat from Bolshevism” had prevented a radical democratic reform of the state, administration, school system and economy. A “Bolshevik danger” did not even exist in 1918/19. Only a small minority of the labor movement cultivated the “spirit of fanatical utopianism”; this tendency had recently even rebelled against the old leadership of the Spartakusbund when they advocated participation in the elections for the National Assembly at the founding party congress of the KPD. According to Rosenberg, the moderate majority of the workers' councils was the given foundation of a “popular democracy” that had been missing in Germany until then; But this potentially stable basis of a republican order had been smashed in the spring and summer of 1919 by the alliance of leading majority Social Democrats, imperial officials and officers:

“The political result of the civil war that was waged on behalf of Noske in the first half of 1919 was the complete annihilation of all political power of the councils. Where workers' councils still existed, they were completely without influence. The attempt to establish a popular, active democracy after the revolution had failed. In connection with this, there was a systematic disarmament of the workers in all places, which the officers carried out with the greatest energy. (...) Hand in hand with this went the systematic arming of the bourgeoisie, the landlords, students and so on, who joined together in temporary volunteer regiments and resident groups. All this mighty expansion, if not the monarchist, then at least the bourgeois-capitalist counter-revolution took place under the slogan: For peace and order and against Spartacus. "

This analysis of the November Revolution was taken up in the late 1950s and 1960s by a younger generation of historians - including Eberhard Kolb , Peter von Oertzen and Reinhard Rürup - in their own studies. Rosenberg's view of the specific substance of the mass movement of the autumn of 1918 offered the opportunity to refer to the scope for action of social democratic politics and thus older conservative and social democratic justification models ("defensive struggle against Bolshevism", inevitable alliance with the old elites, Weimar compromise vs. "Bolshevism") ) questioning.

Rosenberg nevertheless rejected deterministic declarations that attributed the crisis and the end of parliamentary democracy exclusively to the course set in the months of the revolution. In 1920, 1923 and finally in 1929/30 the workers' movement had objectively the possibility of a revolutionary re-establishment of the republic. These chances, which each turned into catastrophic defeats, were on the one hand due to the mistakes or the sterile radicalism of the KPD (1920 the USPD) and on the other hand due to the governmental self-image of the "state party" SPD, which gradually found itself in an "impossible situation" maneuvered was wasted. The labor movement has thus left the field to the counter-revolution.

“From 1929 to 1933, the average socialist functionaries did not see the forest for the trees. They understood all the difficulties and needs of the moment, but overlooked the powerful revolutionary wave that was going through the country at the time. Behind all the loud ranting about the 'system' was a real popular hatred of the capitalist state. Only because the socialists were unable to put themselves at the head of the desperate masses could the counter-revolution take advantage of this movement. "

The NSDAP essentially represented the program of the völkisch, nationalist and bourgeois-conservative right, but interspersed this with socialist phrases; In the crisis phase from 1929 onwards, it had quickly become a mass party because with its rhetoric it was "at the same time in the camp of revolution and counter-revolution".

Rosenberg dated the end of the republican-democratic phase of German history as early as 1930. Brüning's emergency ordinance regime had already been a “dictatorship of the civic bloc”; Brüning had included in his emergency ordinances everything “what the 'economy' demanded.” Until 1932/33, two wings of the anti-republican counter-revolution had fought for power: On the one hand, those represented by Brüning, Westarp and Treviranus , who were quickly depleted by the emergency ordinance policy "Current, on the other hand the direction Hitler / Hugenberg , whose" path of rapid and consistent violence "finally prevailed.

Works

  • The state of the ancient Italians. Investigations into the original constitution of the Latins, Oscans and Etruscans. Berlin 1913.
  • History of the Roman Republic. Leipzig / Berlin 1921.
  • Ancient Democracy and Class Struggle. Bielefeld 1921. New edition Ahriman Verlag, Freiburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8948-4810-1 .
  • The emergence of the German Republic 1871–1918. Berlin 1928. ( Digitized in the digital library Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania).
  • Origin and history of the Weimar Republic. Berlin 1928 - Karlsbad 1935.
  • History of Bolshevism: From Marx to the Present. Berlin 1932 (also in English, Italian, Norwegian, Hebrew and French).
  • Fascism as a mass movement. Its rise and its decomposition. Carlsbad 1934.
  • History of the German Republic. Carlsbad 1935.
  • Democracy and socialism. Amsterdam 1938.
  • Democracy and class struggle. 1938 (also in English).

Letters

  • ... the living proof of her horror AR to Emmy Scholem . In: Munich contributions. Edited by Chair of Jewish History and Culture, Michael Brenner . H. 2, 2013, pp. 33–35 (with subsequent comment by Mirjam Zadoff ). Without ISSN. Access .

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Arthur Rosenberg  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Keßler: Arthur Rosenberg. 2003, p. 65.
  2. ↑ Keßler: Arthur Rosenberg. 2003, p. 63.
  3. ↑ See Walter Markov: Dialogue with the Century. Documented by Thomas Grimm. Berlin / Weimar 1989, p. 34 ff.
  4. ↑ Quoted from Keßler: Arthur Rosenberg. 2003, p. 39, note 137.
  5. ↑ Paul Frölich: A History of Bolshevism? In: Die Weltbühne , vol. 29, no. 9, February 28, 1933, pp. 312–316, here p. 312.
  6. ^ Karl Retzlaw: Spartacus. Rise and fall. Memories of a party worker. 3rd, revised edition, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 305.
  7. ^ Rosenberg: The emergence of the German republic. 1930, p. 15.
  8. ^ Rosenberg: The emergence of the German republic. 1930, p. 14.
  9. ^ Rosenberg: The emergence of the German republic. 1930, p. 40 f.
  10. ^ Rosenberg: The emergence of the German republic. 1930, p. 124.
  11. ^ Rosenberg: The emergence of the German republic. 1930, p. 229.
  12. ^ Rosenberg: The emergence of the German republic. 1930, p. 238.
  13. ^ Rosenberg: The emergence of the German republic. 1930, p. 256.
  14. ^ Arthur Rosenberg: History of the Weimar Republic. 16th edition, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 51.
  15. ^ Rosenberg: History of the Weimar Republic. 1974, p. 64 f.
  16. ^ Rosenberg: History of the Weimar Republic. 1974, p. 200.
  17. ^ Rosenberg: History of the Weimar Republic. 1974, p. 202.
  18. ^ Rosenberg: History of the Weimar Republic. 1974, p. 204.
  19. ^ Rosenberg: History of the Weimar Republic. 1974, p. 197.
  20. ^ Rosenberg: History of the Weimar Republic. 1974, p. 207.
  21. ^ Rosenberg: History of the Weimar Republic. 1974, p. 206.
  22. ^ Editions: Kurt Kersten (ed.): Origin and history of the Weimar Republic. First EVA, 1955; frequent new editions, both together and in the two partial editions: The origin ... or: The story ... z. B. 20th edition, Frankfurt 1980, ISBN 3-434-00003-8 ; most recently in 1991; also published in English.
personal data
SURNAME Rosenberg, Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Marxist historian and politician (USPD, KPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 7, 1943
Place of death new York