Research association SED state

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The SED State Research Association at the Free University of Berlin was founded in 1992 with significant support from the then FU President Johann W. Gerlach . The founders and early employees were Manfred Görtemaker , Siegward Lönnendonker , Bernd Rabehl , Klaus Schroeder , Manfred Wilke and Jochen Staadt . The association has the task of examining “the external and internal conditions of the forty years of existence of a second German dictatorship”.

history

In 2000 the research area was divided into two locations, one headed by Klaus Schroeder, the other headed by Manfred Wilke. Since Wilkes retired in October 2006, the entire facility has been managed by Klaus Schroeder.

The association has initiated numerous projects, such as research into the influence of the Stasi on the electronic media in the GDR and the Federal Republic (Operation Television) or investigations into the image of the GDR among teachers and students.

The basic financial resources have been secured by the Free University of Berlin until the end of 2015. The ongoing research projects are financed from third-party funds. The research association received funds from the Volkswagen Foundation , the Deutsche Bank Cultural Foundation , the German Research Foundation , the ARD and federal and state funds.

criticism

The research network was involved in heated disputes with other specialists on several occasions. Many of these conflicts were triggered by his employees themselves when they - especially in the 1990s - socially liberal historians and political scientists such as Jürgen Kocka , Lutz Niethammer , Peter Steinbach , Peter Christian Ludz and Gert-Joachim Glaeßner a "closeness to the SED regime" or . assumed that the GDR was being played down. The critics of the research alliance primarily addressed the variant of the totalitarianism theory , which its spokesmen raised as a guideline , by means of which the GDR is also discussed as a “totalitarian state”. This deliberately creates a subtle equation with the Nazi regime, already pre-excercised in the self-designation (“SED state” based on the established term “NS state”) and the programmatic talk of the “second German dictatorship”, and ultimately its relativization operated. At the height of these debates, the technical competence of the research association employees was repeatedly questioned. The historian Wolfgang Wippermann rated the main actors as “hobby historians” and “necrophilic anti-communists” who would conduct science as a “political peep show”. According to Wippermann, it is noticeable that many employees “look back on a left-wing past that they want to cope with with a pathologically seeming zeal.” Sigrid Meuschel certified Schroeder and Staadt as “analytical province”. Jürgen Kocka described the heads of the research network as “masters of political demagogy”, they were “authors of half-truths and distortions and scientists without credibility and seriousness - to put it cautiously”. Wolf-Dieter Narr, on the other hand, attested to Schroeder and Staadt that with their criticism of the “system-immanent” GDR research they had “all in all hit the mark”. The contemporary historian Klaus-Dietmar Henke characterized the group as follows in 2003: “The group knew how to combine its pronounced talent for media staging with serious research. a. Analyzes of the securing of power, the structure and politics of the SED. ”The research network was also repeatedly supported by other voices, such as the historian and publicist Götz Aly .

A study on the deaths of the GDR border regime on the inner-German border , which was presented in 2017, was criticized a good year later by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and three federal states . The trigger was a report by the rbb on November 6, 2018. In it, the rbb journalist Gabi Probst criticized the publisher's admission criteria for cases that were classified as “victims of the GDR border regime” beyond the refugees who had died. The historian Christian Sachse spoke in the contribution at least in relation to one case of “intentional manipulation” and said generally: “I think that in many places it is poetry that is in here.” In the rbb contribution and on an extra Probst described a number of cases that were particularly blatant in their opinion: “The examination of the files on which the authors are based showed that at least 50 cases of victims must be questioned. The study also counts officers who have committed suicide and an ex- Waffen-SS man executed in Moscow among the victims. People's police officers who were victims of a rampage are also listed as victims, although there is no direct connection with the border. Many of the fatalities even turn out to be failed enforcers of the border regime. ”The editors immediately rejected the allegations that the rbb contribution“ contained false assertions, allegations and assumptions that mock the self-commitment of the public television program to objective and fair reporting. ” The rbb report sparked further reports and comments in the daily press. The Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters announced that her house would “investigate the allegations and examine the cases now criticized and have them scientifically assessed again”. The Federal Agency for Civic Education , which had included the now criticized study in its program shortly after its publication, withdrew it two days after the rbb report until the allegations were clarified. Since October 2019, the study has been available again in the Federal Central Office's publication series as volume 10119. There was also further criticism from the scientific side. B. Maria Nooke, until 2017 Vice-Director of the Berlin Wall Foundation and co-editor of a comparable study on the fatalities at the Berlin Wall, the doubts put forward by the rbb are justified: "I therefore support the investigation of the results by independent scientists". Michael Kubina, who worked for two decades at the SED State Research Association until 2013 and initially also on the project on the fatalities, indicated that there had already been controversies about the admission criteria during the project. He said the goal of presenting a scientifically proven number of fatalities had not been met: "However, there was apparently an effort to pull the numbers up, and cases have been included that cannot be justified." State Minister for Culture Monika Grütters publicly distanced himself from the figure of 327 deaths previously reported by the BKM and subsequently also by the media and thus implicitly also from the study commissioned and financed by her house. If you subtract all controversial victims, according to Grütters, "in addition to the 138 dead on the Berlin Wall, there are at least 140 people who lost their lives on the inner-German border between 1961 and 1989". This means, on the one hand, that the BKM no longer considers the border regime and its victims before the building of the Wall to be compatible with the time after the building of the Wall, and that the BKM also considers that of Schroeder / Staadt in their case groups B (while exercising the border service), C (in “causal context”) and D (suicides by border guards) excludes recorded victims. The editors Schroeder and Staadt countered with a polemical statement. They object, without providing any evidence, that "the professional world" "reacted" rather with incomprehension to the excitement spread by rbb and Tagesspiegel, which were partly based on false claims and the omission of important facts.

Regardless of this criticism, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is now funding a follow-up project to the research association on the GDR fatalities on the borders of other states in the former Eastern Bloc . The project is part of a research consortium, also financed by the BMBF, which has its own homepage under the title " Iron Curtain ". Participants are Prof. Hubertus Buchstein , University of Greifswald , with a project about the deaths of GDR citizens attempting to escape across the Baltic Sea, and Prof. Manfred Görtemaker , University of Potsdam , with a project that deals with the "function of the GDR Ministry of Justice in the SED state and the arbitrary justice system against those wishing to leave the country and refugees "wants to investigate.

Michael Kubina has published his critical expertise on the study by Schroeder and Staadt as a working paper, a second, updated edition is now also available online and the Federal Agency for Civic Education has published in the Germany Archive under the title Who was a victim of the GDR border regime? a page for discussion of the study activated. In a first contribution, Jochen Staadt and Jan Kostka explain the approach they followed in the study for the SED State Research Association. In a second contribution to the debate, Michael Kubina presents his criticism. In essence, his criticism is directed

  1. against the undifferentiated inclusion of those who died before the wall was built, the clear majority of whom were not refugees,
  2. the very extensive interpretation of what a "causal connection" is with the border regime by the FU authors,
  3. the inclusion of suicides by border guards (mostly not ordinary conscripts) who, in Kubina's opinion, are in many cases not "causally related" to the GDR border regime
  4. as well as 9 people sentenced to death by Soviet military tribunals (SMT) for allegations common at the time ( boycott , espionage, etc.) and executed in Moscow.

The editors of the Germany Archive have announced that they will "continue this debate at this point".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The exemplary prelude to this was Klaus Schroeder, Jochen Staadt: The discrete charm of the status quo. GDR research in the era of détente policy . In: Leviathan , 1/1993, Opladen 1993.
  2. ↑ See Harmsen, Torsten, Tribunal without the accused. The dispute over the SED state research association at the Free University of Berlin is taking on grotesque features . In: Berliner Zeitung , February 2, 1998.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Wippermann: The dictatorship of suspicion. The SED State Research Association at the Free University of Berlin on the hunt for communists. ( Memento of the original from August 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Jungle World on February 19, 1998, accessed November 1, 2012. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / jungle-world.com
  4. ^ Sigrid Meuschel: In search of the missed act. Comment on Klaus Schroeder and Jochen Staadt's criticism of West German GDR research. In: Leviathan , 3/1993, Opladen 1993.
  5. ↑ Quoted from Wolfgang Wippermann: The dictatorship of suspicion. The SED State Research Association at the Free University of Berlin on the hunt for communists. ( Memento of the original from August 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Jungle World on February 19, 1998. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / jungle-world.com
  6. ↑ See Leviathan 1/1993, p. 64.
  7. ↑ Klaus-Dietmar Henke in: R. Eppelmann u. a. (Ed.): Balance sheet and perspectives of GDR research. Paderborn 2003, p. 373.
  8. ↑ Götz Aly : combat scholars on the history front. The dispute over the resistance memorial . In: Berliner Zeitung , August 9, 1997.
  9. ↑ Klaus Schroeder, Jochen Staadt (ed.): The victims of the GDR border regime on the inner-German border 1949-1989. A biographical manual . Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2017, ISBN 978-3-631-72594-8 .
  10. ^ Gabi Probst: GDR border deaths. Does number have to be corrected downwards? In: rbb. November 6, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Gabi Probst: Study turns perpetrators into victims, presumably wrong. Number of deaths at the inner-German border. In: rbb November 24 , 2018, accessed December 19, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Klaus Schroeder, Jochen Staadt: Forschungsverbund SED-Staat rejects allegations of the rbb An rbb report tries to disavow the manual on deaths on the inner-German border. In: FU Berlin. November 7, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  13. ↑ Alexander Fröhlich: GDR border deaths. Grütters wants to examine the study on the number of GDR border deaths. In: Der Tagesspiegel. November 6, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Sven Felix Kellerhoff: Dispute over the number of dead on the inner-German border. In: The world. November 7, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  15. ↑ Gunnar Schupelius: What is behind the attack on the investigators of the GDR state crimes? In: BZ November 11, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  16. ↑ Alexander Fröhlich: GDR border deaths. Grütters wants to examine the study on the number of GDR border deaths. In: Der Tagesspiegel. November 6, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  17. ↑ Klaus Schroeder, Jochen Staadt (ed.): The victims of the GDR border regime on the inner-German border 1949-1989. A biographical manual . (Series of publications by bpp; 10119). Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2017, ISBN 978-3-7425-0119-6 .
  18. ↑ Alexander Fröhlich: Federal Center for Political Education. Controversial study on wall dead "not available". In: Der Tagesspiegel. November 8, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Alexander Fröhlich: Federal Center for Political Education. Controversial study on wall dead "not available". In: Der Tagesspiegel. November 8, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  20. ↑ Alexander Fröhlich: GDR border deaths. Grütters wants to examine the study on the number of GDR border deaths. According to research by the rbb, scientists question a study commissioned by the federal government on the number of deaths at the inner-German border. In: Der Tagesspiegel. November 6, 2018, accessed December 19, 2018 .
  21. ^ Grütters, Monika: Speech by Minister of State for Culture Grütters at the discussion event on the 30th anniversary of the lifting of the order to shoot at the GDR border. Press and Information Office of the Federal Government, April 9, 2019, accessed on July 16, 2019 .
  22. ↑ Probst, Gabi: Grütters distances himself from the study on borderline deaths. In: rbb24. rbb, April 10, 2019, accessed on July 16, 2019 .
  23. ↑ Klaus Schroeder, Jochen Staadt (ed.): The deaths of the GDR border regime . S. 16 f .
  24. ↑ New figures from State Minister Monika Grütters announces the official death toll from the GDR border regime. In: Free University of Berlin. Forschungsverbund SED-Staat, April 11, 2019, accessed on July 19, 2019 .
  25. ↑ Amory Burchard: Who died on the Iron Curtain. In: Der Tagesspiegel. January 3, 2019, accessed January 1, 2019 .
  26. ↑ The SED State Research Association of the Free University examines the deaths of GDR citizens at the Iron Curtain. In: Free University of Berlin, No. 375/2018. December 28, 2018, accessed January 3, 2019 .
  27. ↑ Iron Curtain. Fatal escapes and perversion of the law. Free University of Berlin, accessed on August 15, 2019 .
  28. ↑ Michael Kubina: "Framing" as a historiographical discipline? For the discussion of the FU study by Schroeder / Staadt: “Death victims of the GDR border regime” . 1st edition. Berlin April 4, 2019, p. 43 .
  29. ↑ Michael Kubina: "Framing" as a historiographical discipline? For the discussion of the FU study by Schroeder / Staadt: “Death victims of the GDR border regime” . 2nd updated edition. Working paper / self-published, Berlin July 2019, p. 56 ( google.com ).
  30. ↑ Jochen Staadt, Jan Kostka: Deaths of the GDR border regime. A research. In: Germany Archive. Federal Agency for Civic Education , August 13, 2019, accessed on August 15, 2019 .
  31. ↑ Michael Kubina: Who was the victim of the border regime? Another point of view. In: Germany Archive. Federal Agency for Civic Education , August 13, 2019, accessed on August 15, 2019 .
  32. ↑ Who was the victim of the GDR border regime? Two views on one subject. In: Germany Archive. Federal Agency for Civic Education , August 13, 2019, accessed on August 15, 2019 .