Erich Paterna

Erich Paterna (born February 19, 1897 in Genschmar , † April 22, 1982 in Berlin ) was a German historian .

Erich Paterna was born the son of a postal agent. After attending school and beginning training as a primary school teacher, he did his military service from 1916 to 1918 with the rank of sergeant . After the end of the war he continued his primary school teacher training. From 1920 to 1927 Paterna worked as a primary school teacher and became a middle school teacher in 1927. In the same year he joined the SPD . From 1930 to 1933 he was the principal of a school in Frankfurt (Oder) . In 1930 he switched from the SPD to the KPD . Because of this party membership, he was dismissed from school in 1933. From 1933 to 1936 he was Rottenführer of SA Brigade 122, but at the same time also illegally active in the resistance against the Nazis . In 1936 he got a job as a teacher at a school in Niederlausitz , but was exposed and arrested in the same year. Until 1940 he was imprisoned in the Brandenburg-Görden prison.

After his release in 1940 he worked as a temporary accountant until January 1945. He was recruited for forced service in the Soviet Red Army from January to May 1945 . From May to July 1945 he was the deputy head of the Berlin-Schöneberg District School Office and from July 1945 to mid-1946 a research assistant on the party executive of the KPD. In this function he was involved in the development of the “Guidelines for Teaching German History” . Paterna joined the SED in 1946 . In the same year he took over the chair for the history of the German labor movement at the party university of the SED. From 1953 to 1963 he was director of the Institute for German History at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In the years 1953 to 1958 he also took up a professorship . He received his doctorate in 1955 and habilitated in 1958 with a study of the class struggles of the Mansfeld miners from the 15th to the 17th centuries . From 1958 to 1963 Paterna was a full professor , from 1963 he retired. In 1977 he received the title of Dr. hc from Humboldt University. In 1972, Paterna received the Patriotic Order of Merit (VVO) in gold, in 1977 the VVO bar of honor and in 1982 the Karl Marx Order . Through his work, he had a major impact on the historians of the GDR.

literature

• Paterna, Erich . In: Collegium Politicum at the University of Hamburg. Historiography Working Group (Ed.): Historians in Central Germany . Ferd. Dümmerls Verlag, Bonn, Hanover, Hamburg, Munich 1965, p. 73.
• Kurt Pätzold : Erich Paterna. In: Heinz Heitzer / Karl-Heinz Noack (eds.): Trailblazers of GDR history. Berlin 1989, pp. 182-202, ISBN 3-320-01055-7 .
• Harry Waibel : Servant of many masters. Former Nazi functionaries in the Soviet Zone / GDR. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-63542-1 .
• Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk:  Paterna, Erich . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Rüdiger Bergien : The silence of the cadres. Former National Socialists in the central SED party apparatus - an investigation , in: Continuities and Discontinities (edited by Birthe Kundrus & Sybille Steinbacher ; Contributions to the History of National Socialism, Vol. 29), Göttingen 2013, p. 144.

Web links

• Literature by and about Erich Paterna in the catalog of the German National Library