Helmut Eschwege

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Helmut Eschwege (born July 10, 1913 in Hanover ; died October 19, 1992 in Dresden ) was a German historian and documentarist .

The Jewish Helmut Eschwege managed to emigrate and immigrate to Palestine in the 1930s . After the end of National Socialist rule , he went to the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ), stayed in the GDR and was one of the very few historians in the GDR to publish on Jewish history and the Shoah . Eschwege, who had originally trained as a businessman, did not decide to work as a historian until 1952/53. At that time the SED led a campaign against the Jewish communities of the GDR, which they described as the " 5th column of US imperialism". Many Jews fled. Eschwege stayed, wrote and published with great difficulty. Internationally he was a respected researcher. In the GDR he was marginalized and harassed. When the SED dictatorship collapsed in the GDR, he and others founded the Social Democratic Party in the GDR (SDP) in Dresden and wrote his memoirs.

Life

Helmut Eschwege attended the Talmud Tora School in Hamburg and trained as a businessman from 1929 to 1931 and then went on a hike. From 1929 to 1933 he was a member of the SPD and the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold fighting organization . In 1934 he emigrated to Denmark and in 1937 came to Palestine. There he worked as a transport and plantation worker and joined the Communist Party of Palestine . In 1942 he volunteered for the British Army, where he was employed as a civilian worker .

In 1945 he had advised Paul Merker, who later became a member of the KPD leadership , that a German government should issue the following declaration: “The German people expect that the Jews' trust in them will return in the future. It hopes to prove this through its future leadership and deeds. The overwhelming majority of the German people, through active or passive participation in the Hitler system, recognize their guilt towards the Jews and hope to repay some of their guilt from the few surviving Jews and Jewish communities through extensive reparation for the economic and physical damage. ”This attitude persisted not through in the SED.

In 1946 he returned to Germany via Karlsbad . In 1947 he organized the repatriation of large book collections from Jewish property from Prague to Germany. The collection was transferred to the holdings of the Museum of German History in 1952, where Eschwege was head of department. In the following period he was expelled from the SED several times (among other things because of " Zionism ") and re-accepted into the party. After his third exclusion from the party in 1958, he went to the Technical University of Dresden as a librarian . Here he was demoted to porter in 1976 for unauthorized copying of western literature, but due to his international reputation he was reinstated as a documentarist. However, he had to write all of his publications in his spare time. The GDR did not recognize Eschwege as a historian.

In his autobiography ( Strangers Among My Equals , Berlin 1991), Eschwege described the decades of harassment with which the SED hindered and tried to destroy its research on the history of Jewish life in Germany. His documentation about the discrimination, disenfranchisement and extermination of the Jews under National Socialism "Kennzeichen J" could only appear after 1966 in the GDR. Eschwege's additional analysis of the persecution and extermination of the Jews remained unprinted. His internationally acclaimed book “The Synagogue in German History” (1980) was with the publisher for twelve years and had to be revised several times. The study “Assertion and Resistance. German Jews in the Struggle for Existence and Human Dignity 1933-1945 ”(1984), revised by the historian Konrad Kwiet , could only appear in the Federal Republic. Only the Germania Judaica library in Cologne was interested in his manuscript “History of Yiddish Language and Literature”, and Eschwege handed it over to Eschwege after unsuccessful negotiations with the publisher. His work on the history of the Jews who had lived in the area of ​​the later GDR before 1945 and the manuscript on the history of the Jewish cemeteries in the GDR also remained unpublished. Only copies of the manuscripts are still available in some libraries in the new federal states. However, Eschwege also published on these topics in the West.

The historian corresponded in his research with institutes, museums and personalities all over the world. As the historian Hartewig sums up, he “pursued cultural policy on unconventional side paths as a loner on his own ...” Internationally, he soon received the recognition that the GDR refused to give him. Of course, his activities were also monitored by the Ministry for State Security (MfS). It was processed in the operational process (OV) "Zionist".

Despite all the handicaps, Eschwege had a sphere of activity in the GDR that extended beyond the Jewish community. Since 1965 he was also to be found frequently as a speaker in various working groups for Christian-Jewish cooperation and at conferences of the “ Action Reconciliation ”. As we know from the memories of various civil rights activists, he also played a major role in encouraging young people to deal with the subject of the Shoah. It was not for nothing that the Coordination Council of the Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation of the Federal Republic awarded him the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal on March 11, 1984 in Worms, together with the Leipzig pastor Siegfried Theodor Arndt . Eschwege wrote: "The award ... was of course primarily an award for the many activities of Christian-Jewish groups in the GDR, which operate under different names and are grouped together in the Federation of Evangelical Churches."

The harassment that Eschwege was exposed to had an essential reason: every publication on the subject of Jews, the Shoah and Germany in the GDR once again made people aware that the anti-fascist state refused to the end completely, all Jews damaged by the National Socialists or their descendants to compensate or to refund the "aryanized" property. Aid to rebuild Israel was also rejected. It was not until the freely elected People's Chamber after the end of the SED dictatorship in 1990 - on the initiative of civil rights activist Konrad Weiß  - that it was responsible for all of German history and in 1990 the "Restitution East" was initiated as part of the Unification Treaty.

Unofficial employee of the State Security

Grave of Helmut Eschwege in the New Jewish Cemetery in Dresden

Eschwege was run by the MfS as an unofficial employee ("IM Ferdinand"). Until the end of the GDR he did not want to believe that the SED could not change its views on anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism and its attitude towards Israel. This is probably one of the reasons why he saw no problem in being recruited as an unofficial employee. The first contact, however, came about through simple blackmail: Eschwege wanted to visit his sisters who had not returned to Germany and his mother in Israel. Originally the SED did not want to let him travel, the MfS agreed, but tied its consent to the historian's willingness to write reports. Not infrequently, Eschwege wrote his reports with a good deal of clandestine: he was moved, as the historian Hartewig wrote, “the ambition with his travel reports to have a decisive influence on the Israeli image of the State Security and the SED.” Of course, Eschwege belonged in the 1980s Years also to the most important informants of the MfS in the Jewish communities and about their long-time association chairman Helmut Aris . He even presented his MfS officer with the appeal of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which was newly founded during the GDR turnaround, and one of whose co-founders was Eschwege in Dresden.

Helmut Eschwege died in 1992. His grave is in the New Jewish Cemetery in Dresden.

Publications

  • Mark J. Pictures, documents, reports on the history of the crimes committed by Hitler's fascism against German Jews 1933–1945. Berlin 1966.
  • Resistance of German Jews against the Nazi Regime. In: Leo Baeck Year Book 15, 1970
  • The synagogue in German history. Berlin 1980
  • Assertiveness and Resistance. German Jews in the struggle for existence and human dignity 1933–1945. Hamburg 1984. Together with Konrad Kwiet .
  • History of the Yiddish Language and Literature. As a manuscript in the Germanica Judaica library in Cologne
  • History of the Jews in the territory of the former GDR. 4 volumes. 1991, unpublished, in the holdings of the German Library.
  • The Jewish population in the years after the capitulation of Hitler Germany on the territory of the GDR up to 1953. In: Siegfried Theodor Arndt, Helmut Eschwege, Peter Honigmann , Lothar Mertens : Jews in the GDR - History - Problems - Perspectives. Working materials on intellectual history, Cologne 1988
  • Social work in Judaism. In: Diakonie. Handout of the Diakonisches Werk - Innere Mission und Hilfswerk - of the Evangelical Churches in the GDR. Information 2, Berlin 1990
  • Strange among my own kind. Memories of a Dresden Jew. Berlin 1991
  • Anti-Semitism and mass murder. Contributions to the history of the persecution of the Jews. Red. Giesela Neuhaus. Ed. Nora Goldenbogen and others Rosa-Luxemburg-Verein Sachsen , Leipzig 1994 ISBN 9783929994193 ; therein Eschwege: On the deportation of old Jews through " home purchase contracts " 1942 - 1945 . Pp. 51-73
  • Hereticization of Israel and the Jews in the GDR. In: Horch and Guck , issue 44, 2003/04

literature

  • Hajo Funke : Interview with Helmut Eschwege. In: New German Critic 38, 1986.
  • Robin Ostow: Jewish life in the GDR. Bodenheim 1989.
  • Horst Seferens: Secret squint at the "base of the enemy". In: Jüdische Allgemeine , edition of October 22, 1992.
  • Strange among his own kind. On the death of the Jewish historian Helmut Eschwege. In: analyze & kritik , No. 348, November 19, 1992.
  • Gabriele Eschenazi, Gabriele Nissim : Ebrei invisibili. Milan 1995 (in Italian).
  • Jeffrey Herf : Two kinds of memories. Berlin 1998.
  • Karin Hartewig: Back. The history of the Jewish communists in the GDR. Weimar, Vienna 2000.
  • Stefan Meining : Communist Jewish policy. The GDR, the Jews and Israel. Munster 2002.
  • Robin Ostow: Jews in the GDR and German reunification. Berlin 2002.
  • Konrad Weiß : A trip to Auschwitz. In: Horch and Guck , issue 44, 2003/04.
  • Peter Maser : Helmut Eschwege. A historian in the GDR. In: Horch and Guck , issue 44, 2003/04.
  • Martin Jander: Helmut Eschwege. In: Vito Palmieri et al. (Ed.): See through the horizon. Berlin 2005.
  • Karin Hartewig:  Eschwege, Helmut . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Eschwege, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and documentarist
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1992
Place of death Dresden