Israel Getzler

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Israel Getzler (born May 14, 1920 in Berlin ; † January 8, 2012 ) was a German - Israeli historian of Polish-Jewish descent and an expert on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union .

Life

Getzler, who was born as the son of a Jewish family who immigrated to Berlin from Poland , grew up in the period of growing National Socialism and joined the Zionist socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair . In the course of the November pogroms in 1938 , he and his family were deported to Poland . After the outbreak of World War II , he was relocated to a gold mining settlement in Siberia by the Soviet authorities . When the family finally moved to the Volga German Republic , he began his first studies and learned the English language with the help of a dictionary . After the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, the family successfully applied to leave the Soviet Union and finally emigrated to Australia .

After graduating with a degree in history , he got a job at the University of Adelaide . In addition, research assignments took him to Great Britain to present his ideas about the October Revolution to important scholars such as Edward Hallett Carr , Leonard Schapiro and Isaiah Berlin . Although he respected EH Carr as the leading expert on Stalinism , he rejected what he considered to be philosophical determinism and regretted his failure to explain to Carr why he was taking political losers seriously. On the other hand, he used the extensive collection of documents in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University for his research .

1967 appeared with Martov. A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat is a biography of Julius Martov , who, as a Marxist and democratic socialist, lost the fight against the Lenin -led October Revolution. Getzler, who admired Martov deeply, pointed out numerous strategic and tactical mistakes that Martov made. Refusing to view history merely as an interlude of impersonal forces, he insisted that the selection of individuals and groups mattered.

In 1971, his commitment to Zionism finally led him to Israel , where he took over a professorship in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . Although he looked forward to his new homeland all his life, he was disappointed in the way it dominated and discriminated against the Palestinians during the occupation of the West Bank . This led him to condemn the Israeli settlement policies of both the Avoda and Likud of Menachem Begin . He also took part in numerous demonstrations against the settlement policy and was one of the supporters of the Peace Now movement ( Shalom Achschaw ).

In his later books Kronstadt 1917-21: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (1983) on the Kronstadt Sailor Uprising in March 1921, as well as Nikolai Sukhanov. Chronicler of the Russian revolution (2002) about Nikolai Sukhanov (actually Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Himmer) he showed that the path of democracy that was not taken was in his view a real, realistic alternative.

As one of the most famous historians in the history of the Soviet Union, he welcomed the policy of glasnost and perestroika initiated by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev in the late 1980s , and on his regular research trips to Great Britain examined the issues of the government newspaper Izvestia for signs of democratic change in the Soviet Union .

Publications

Background literature

  • Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917. Tribute to Israel Getzler , editors Edith Rogovin Frankel, Jonathan Frankel, Baruch Knei-Paz, 1992, ISBN 0-521-40585-8

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Getzler, Israel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Israeli historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 2012