Kurt Finker

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Kurt Finker (born August 27, 1928 in Sacrow ; † August 6, 2015 ) was a German historian . He made a name for himself above all with his work on the military and civil resistance to National Socialism , which achieved high editions, was translated into several languages ​​and was also recognized by Western historians. The fact that Finker no longer limited anti-fascism to communist resistance marked a turning point in the history of the GDR .

Life

Education and scientific activity

After primary school, the son of a worker attended a teacher training college from 1942 to 1944 . In 1944 he was first obliged to do the Reich Labor Service and also took part in World War II as a soldier . After his release from captivity , he received a ten-day short training course for new teachers in 1945 and taught as a school assistant at various village schools and as a new teacher at the Lübben elementary school until 1948 . In 1946 he passed the first teacher examination and served as principal of a primary school from 1948 to 1949. In 1949 he took part in an advanced training course for history teachers. In 1950 he became a lecturer in history at the workers and farmers faculty in Potsdam .

In 1951 Finker, who had joined the SED in April 1946 , was delegated to the SED state party school in Schmerwitz near Belzig for a one-year course. In 1952 he worked as an instructor in the SED state leadership in Brandenburg. In the same year Finker passed the second teacher examination and in 1953 passed the state examination for history teachers in the upper level.

From September 1952 Finker was a scientific assistant and from 1953 senior assistant at the Institute for Social Sciences at the "Karl Liebknecht" University of Education in Potsdam . In July 1958 he received his doctorate there with the thesis "The Red Front Fighters League as the embodiment of the revolutionary defense of the German working class (1924-1929)". He then took on a lectureship for the "Basics of Marxism-Leninism " at the PH Potsdam and completed his habilitation in May 1964 with a thesis on "The militaristic military associations in the Weimar Republic and their role in the oppression of the working class and in preparing a new one imperialist war (1924-1929) ”. The work arose within the framework of a working group “Militarist and Nationalist Associations”, which was supported by Potsdam historians, but which also included other researchers. The research results were also included in the form of articles in the lexicon of bourgeois parties for which Dieter Fricke at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena was responsible .

In September 1964 Finker received a professorship with a teaching assignment for the history of the latest time at the PH Potsdam and in 1969 a chair which he held until he took early retirement in 1991, or, in the words of Werner Röhr , “early retirement was pushed ”. Here he headed a research group on the “History of the German Resistance Movement”, which dealt primarily with the resistance in the context of the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 , and whose publications met with a response from the national and international public. From 1973 to 1978 Finker was Deputy Director of the German Studies / History Section and from 1979 to 1985 Vice Rector for Social Sciences at the PH Potsdam. In 1984 Finker was appointed director of the history section there of the National Prize of the GDR III. Class awarded. In addition to Kurt Libera , Gisela Schott , Günter Benser , Manfred Banaschak , Rolf Hoth , Heinz Vietze and Ulrich Peck , Finker worked on the paper We are irrevocably breaking with Stalinism as a system! involved, which Michael Schumann at the special party congress of the SED / PDS on 8./9. December and 16./17. December 1989 was read in the Berlin Dynamo sports hall. Finker joined the PDS and was a member of the Advisory Board of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Brandenburg in 2003/4 .

Work for the Ministry of State Security

From 1964 Finker worked in one form or another for the Ministry of State Security . First of all, following an inquiry, he made a room in his apartment available for “conspiratorial purposes”. After he quit this job in 1968, he was assigned from 1969 to 1987 as IM "Hans" on West German known to him. Finker also traveled to the West on operational behalf of the State Security, reported meticulously about personal encounters and handed over his correspondence to the Stasi. The Stasi wanted to make use of Finker's knowledge and contacts to survivors of the civil and military resistance against National Socialism and to prepare the “targeted processing of CDU / CSU executives ”. Finker also reported on the University of Education in Potsdam and students. In June 1974 he was awarded the Bronze Medal of Merit of the National People's Army and in 1975 he was a travel cadre of the Central Committee of the SED .

The historian Werner Bramke , a student of Finker, reports that the Ministry for State Security tried to recruit him in 1969. He refused and then consulted with Finker, who confirmed his decision. Bramke suspects that Finker did not want to denounce him with his reports, but wanted to protect him, and apparently at least partially achieved this goal. Finker promoted him at a time when he, Bramke, had fallen out of favor with the Stasi.

The historian Rainer Eckert assesses Finker's contacts with the West and the recognition he found there: “All of this made sense and should not be discredited in retrospect. German-German scientific contacts were also necessary and the policy of change through rapprochement appeared to be the only realistic possibility of change in the GDR for a long time. So those who maintained these connections did the right thing, and scientifically there were good reasons for doing so. But that does not justify Finker's betrayal, which is all the more depressing since it was precisely the scientific appreciation of the German resistance against Hitler that was misused for it. "

plant

Finker initially dealt with the history of the military defense associations, in particular the Red Front Fighters Association in the Weimar Republic. In his study on the Red Front Fighters League , published in 1981, the historian Andreas Wirsching attests that it was able to provide detailed information by exploiting materials that were not accessible to Western historians at the time, but that it suffered from the ideologically one-sided view of the SED party history. Finker's early research and that of Kurt Adamy on the history of social democracy from 1890 to 1900 led at the beginning of the 1980s to the project to compile a manual for the organizations of the German labor movement. Finker led a research group on this. By the time the project was terminated in 1991, over 90 external authors had been won and more than 130 contributions from over 250 projected entries were available.

Finker's work on the resistance to National Socialism also found recognition in the West, and is also seen as a turning point in the history of the GDR. Since the Soviet Union originally rated the attack of July 20 as negative, the bourgeois-conservative opposition in the Soviet zone of occupation and the GDR was largely rated negatively and not recognized as anti-fascist resistance. Finker's research is considered to have played a major role in overcoming the blanket assessment of July 20, 1944 as "reactionary". In 1967 he published a biography of Claus Graf von Stauffenberg and in 1978 his book on Helmuth James Graf von Moltke and the Kreisau Circle in the CDU's Union-Verlag . Both works were controversial within the SED because Finker broke away from the one-sided image of anti-fascism limited to communist resistance and praised the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 as a morally honorable, courageous act for the benefit of the German people. Finker pointed out that Stauffenberg had at least sought contact with the communists.

Although Finker was already working for the State Security at that time, he was only able to publish his Stauffenberg biography with the support of the Soviet historian Daniil Melnikow . Melnikov's study for July 20, which had appeared in German in 1964, and Finker's studies had in the wake of VI. SED party congresses signal effect. Nevertheless, historians from the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED and the Central Institute for History in the Institute for Social Science at the Central Committee of the SED, such as Wolfgang Schumann, criticized Finker's Stauffenberg biography. They complained that the class struggle character of the resistance and the leading role of the KPD were not sufficiently clear. The Stauffenberg group is also being moved too close to the labor movement . The criticism meant that a new edition was initially not planned and could only appear in 1971. In order to get permission from the Ministry of Culture to print , Finker had to "update" the topic in a final chapter. When the Kreisau Circle and the Movement of July 20 were specifically researched in the GDR from 1983, Finker published an article on July 20, 1984 in Neues Deutschland with the title The courageous act of Obersten Stauffenberg gave the signal by which the military dem anti-fascist resistance was assigned equal rights. However, July 20 remained a marginal area within resistance research in the GDR.

After the fall of the Wall, Finker criticized the KPD's thesis of social fascism and stated that this concept had been insufficiently analyzed and uncritically evaluated in the GDR historical scholarship . Andreas Wirsching reproached Finker for ignoring the existing research on "social fascism" and advocating the untenable thesis that the KPD had fought the NSDAP more decisively than the SPD .

Fonts

As an author:

  • The suppression of the Kapp Putsch in the then administrative district of Potsdam. A contribution to the history of the local labor movement. Commission for research into the history of the local labor movement at the district leadership of the SED, Potsdam 1960.
  • The militarist defense associations in the Weimar Republic and their role in the oppression of the working class and in the preparation of a new imperialist war. Habilitation thesis, University of Education Potsdam 1964.
  • with Bernd Mahlke and Walter Schmidtke: Study material on German history from 1917–1945. Pedagogical University, Potsdam 1965.
  • The militaristic defense associations in the Weimar Republic. A contribution to the strategy and tactics of the German big bourgeoisie. In: Journal of History. Volume 14, No. 3, 1966, pp. 357-377.
  • Stauffenberg and July 20, 1944. Union-Verlag, Berlin 1967.
  • with Werner Bethge and Bernhard Mahlke: On the history of the German people 1917 to 1945. Pedagogical University, Potsdam 1975.
  • Research into the struggle of the KPD against militarism, fascism and imperialist preparation for war, 1919–1933. In: Contributions to the history of the labor movement. Volume 19, No. 6, 1977, pp. 947-965.
  • Count Moltke and the Kreisau Circle. Union-Verlag, Berlin 1978.
  • Problems of the military resistance and the attempted coup of July 20, 1944 in Germany. In: Opponents of National Socialism. Scientists and resistance fighters in search of historical reality. Campus publishing house, Frankfurt a. M. [ua] 1980, ISBN 3-593-32698-1 , pp. 153-186.
  • History of the Red Front Fighter League. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1981.
  • Assassination attempt on Hitler July 20, 1944. ( Illustrated historical booklets : Issue 56), Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-326-00321-8 .
  • July 20, 1944 and GDR history. German Resistance Memorial Center, Berlin 1990.
  • KPD and anti-fascism 1929 to 1934. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft. Volume 41, 1993, pp. 389-398.
  • July 20, 1944. Military coup or revolution? Dietz, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-320-01836-1 .
  • A noble family in times of upheaval. The fate of the von Ribbeck family in Havelland (1933–1947). In: Aristocracy and state administration in Brandenburg in the 19th and 20th centuries. A historical comparison. 1996, pp. 219-237.
  • The position of the Soviet Union and Soviet historiography on July 20, 1944. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär , Robert Buck (ed.): July 20. The “other Germany” in politics of the past (= Antifa Edition ). Elefanten Press, Berlin 1998, pp. 47-67.
  • with Ines Reich: reactionaries or patriots? On historiography and resistance research in the GDR until 1990 . In: Gerd R. Ueberschär and Robert Buck (eds.): July 20. The “other Germany” in politics of the past (= Antifa Edition ). Elefanten Press, Berlin 1998, pp. 158-178.
  • Markers against militarists. The fight against the Kapp Putsch in the province of Brandenburg March 1920. GNN-Verlag, Schkeuditz 2000, ISBN 3-89819-030-7 .
  • "Defense Associations" in the Weimar Republic. In: Antifascism as a humanist legacy in Europe. Festschrift for the 60th birthday of Prof. Dr. Rolf Richter. 2005, pp. 21-40.

As editor:

  • Pedagogical University "Karl Liebknecht" Potsdam. A brief outline of the history of a teacher training institution. Pedagogical University, Potsdam 1984.
  • with Huberta Engel: German Resistance - Democracy Today. Church, Kreisau Circle, Ethics, Military and Trade Unions. Bouvier, Bonn 1992, ISBN 3-416-02342-0 .
  • with Friedrich-Martin Balzer : The demon came upon us. About the reappraisal of fascism and anti-fascism in the historical image and in the historiography of West Germany (1945-1955). Pahl-Rugenstein, Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-89144-403-0 .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Historical Commission mourns Kurt Finker , reports on the work of the Historical Commission , September 1, 2015, website of the party Die Linke , accessed on January 26, 2016.
  2. ↑ Werner Röhr: settlement. The end of the history of the GDR. Volume 1. Edition Organon, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-931034-16-0 , p. 460.
  3. ↑ a b c Rainer Eckert: Resistance and betrayal In: Horch und Guck. Volume 20, 1997, pp. 30–32 ( online ( memento of the original from March 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice . ). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.horch-und-guck.info
  4. ↑ Werner Bramke: Free spaces and limits of a historian in the GDR system. Reflections six years later . In: Karl Heinrich Pohl (Ed.): Historians in the GDR. V & R, Göttingen 1997, pp. 39, 44.
  5. ↑ Andreas Wirsching: From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56357-2 , p. 246.
  6. ↑ Werner Röhr: settlement. The end of the history of the GDR. Volume 1, Edition Organon, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-931034-16-0 , p. 188.
  7. ↑ a b Werner Röhr: settlement. The end of the history of the GDR. Volume 2, Edition Organon, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-931034-16-0 , pp. 543f.
  8. ↑ Johannes Tuchel: Forgotten, suppressed, ignored. Reflections on the history of the reception of the resistance against National Socialism in post-war Germany. In: Johannes Tuchel (ed.): The forgotten resistance. On real history and perception of the struggle against the Nazi dictatorship (Dachau Symposia on Contemporary History, Volume 5). Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-943-0 , p. 16.
  9. ↑ Roland Kopp: Paul von Hase. From the Alexander barracks to Plötzensee. A German soldier biography 1885–1944. 2nd Edition. Lit, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-5035-8 , p. 18.
  10. ^ Ines Reich: The image of the German resistance in the public and science of the GDR. In: Peter Steinbach and Johannes Tuchel (eds.): Resistance against National Socialism. Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, Bonn 1994, ISBN 3-89331-195-5 ( series of publications / Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung . 323), p. 565f., Cited. 566.
  11. ↑ Roland Kopp: Paul von Hase. From the Alexander barracks to Plötzensee. A German soldier biography 1885–1944. 2nd Edition. Lit, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-5035-8 , pp. 18f.
  12. ↑ Andreas Wirsching: From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56357-2 , p. 528.
personal data
SURNAME Finker, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Sacrow (Spreewaldheide)
DATE OF DEATH August 6, 2015