Rudolf Lindau (politician)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rudolf Lindau (around 1924)

Paul Rudolf Lindau ( pseudonym Rudolf Graetz ; born March 28, 1888 in Riddagshausen ; † October 18, 1977 in Berlin ) was a German politician and historian . After he had belonged to the social democratic youth movement in Hamburg before the First World War , he was one of the driving forces of the Hamburg KPD after the November Revolution . Within the KPD he was in the middle, the so-called "middle group". He was mainly active in the press and agitprop work. In 1934 he emigrated to the Soviet Union , where he worked at the International Lenin School and during World War II taught at anti-fascist schools in POW camps. In the German Democratic Republic , Lindau headed the newly founded party college "Karl Marx" from 1947 . In connection with Wolfgang Leonhard's escape , Lindau was replaced in September 1950 and became a full-time employee of the "Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute" at the Central Committee of the SED . He contributed to the establishment of a Marxist-Leninist historiography, but offended the SED with his efforts to emphasize the socialist element in the November Revolution .

Life

Until the First World War

Rudolf Lindau was born the son of a saddler and upholsterer in Riddagshausen near Braunschweig . The family was poor. Lindau attended elementary schools in Braunschweig and Hildesheim . He worked in various professions until he found employment at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg in 1907 . As a transport worker, he joined the union in 1904 and became a member of the SPD in 1907 . He was active in the party's youth movement and in 1910 became a full-time employee of the SPD as secretary to Heinrich Laufenberg . As an autodidact, he supported Laufenberg in writing a history of the workers' movement in Hamburg, Altona and the surrounding area and from 1911 worked as a reporter for strike and trade union issues for the social democratic Hamburg Echo .

Lindau belonged to the left wing of the party, did systematic anti-war work in the youth movement during World War I and in 1916 took part in the founding of the Free Youth Organization of Hamburg-Altona . As a representative of Hamburg, he took part in the Reich Conference of the “Internationale” group on January 1, 1916 in Berlin. Together with the Bremen representative Johann Knief , he called for the immediate establishment of a left-wing radical party. He was also in the opposition in the Hamburg SPD. On September 1, 1916, he was called up for military service and was deployed as a reinforcement soldier on the Western Front until the end of the war . His first wife, Auguste, kept in touch with the headquarters of the Spartakusbund in Berlin. When he returned to Hamburg in mid-November 1918, Lindau took over the press office of the Hamburg workers 'and soldiers' council under Laufenberg.

KPD functionary

In the spring of 1919 Lindau was secretary of the Hamburg local branch of the KPD , which is rated as "ultra-left". From May 1919 he was the only editor of the new newspaper Kommunistische Arbeiterzeitung , in which he turned against the national Bolshevik direction of Laufenberg. When the Hamburg KPD split at the end of February 1920, only 300 of the 3,000 members under Lindau's leadership remained with the KPD. Lindau became secretary and traveling speaker, and finally editor of the Hamburger Volkszeitung . At the 8th party congress of the KPD in Leipzig in 1923 he was elected to the headquarters with the most votes of all candidates and left Hamburg to work at the KPD's organizational office from May 1923 to April 1924, which at the time also included Wilhelm Pieck , Walter Ulbricht , Georg Schumann and Ottomar Geschke belonged. He founded the official organ of the party workers , was a senior editor of the KPD press organs such as the Communist Workers' newspaper , the Communist press correspondent and Bergischen Arbeiterstimme and worked under the pseudonym Hohmann in December 1923, "Guidelines for the reorganization of the party". Lindau campaigned for the “Bolshevization” of the party and the conversion of party work to company cells. He thus proved to be a supporter of the "middle group" of the KPS.

From 1921 to 1924 and 1927/1928 Lindau belonged to the Hamburg citizenship . In May 1924, after Wilhelm Deisens was forced to renounce his mandate by the party executive , he received his mandate in the Reichstag . Even before the opening of the Reichstag, Lindau was arrested in May 1924 as a member of the headquarters from 1923 and involved in the Hamburg uprising . Until the end of 1925 he was in custody in Moabit and wrote under the pseudonym Karl Walther for Die Internationale . He had thus escaped the reorganization of the KPD apparatus by the new party leadership under Ernst Thälmann . As he enjoyed a high reputation in the party, he was supposed to act as the political leader of the Wasserkante district , but, as he stood up against corruption and mismanagement in the Hamburg party organization, was released from this position at Thälmann's instigation in February 1927 and replaced by John Wittorf . Back in Berlin, Lindau worked in the agit.prop. Department of the Central Committee in the press department. In 1930 he became editor-in-chief of the fighter in Chemnitz, from 1932 to 1933 of the illustrated people's echo for Saxony, Leipzig and Dresden.

After Hitler came to power , Lindau initially belonged to the illegal district leadership of East Saxony in Dresden. Under the code name "Toni" he headed the Agit.prop. Division and published the illegal workers' voice . His son (who was also called Rudolf Lindau) was sentenced to death by a Nazi court for allegedly participating in the Altona Bloody Sunday and executed on January 10, 1934. Lindau emigrated to the Soviet Union via Czechoslovakia in 1934 , where he continued to research historical topics under the pseudonym Rudolf Graetz . He is one of 18 of 68 KPD functionaries who survived the Stalinist purges . He worked in the German sector of the Lenin School , was a teacher at party schools and was a member of a "Committee for Party History" convened in December 1935. In October 1941 he was evacuated to a collective farm in Ufa , but was ordered back to Moscow in early 1942 . From April 1942 he taught at Antifa schools for German prisoners of war. He was one of the signatories of the “Appeal to the German People” of January 25, 1942 and the obituary for Thälmann on September 17, 1944. He was also appointed to the “Working Commission” of the KPD Central Committee from March 1944 and worked in the National Committee for Free Germany (NKFD).

In the DDR

In August / September 1945 Lindau returned to Germany and became an employee of the Agit.prop. Department. He became a member of the SED in 1946 and was from 1947 to 1950 first on par with Paul Lenzner , then from January 1949 sole director of the Karl Marx party college . His brochure Problems of the History of the German Labor Movement was a basic text of historical-theoretical party work. On September 12, 1950, the SED Politburo appointed Hanna Wolf as director of the party university and Rudolf Lindau became a research assistant at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism (IML) at the SED Central Committee with the task of developing a biography of Ernst Thalmann. In 1953 he was released from this task and in 1956 published the brochure Ernst Thälmann - Leben und Kampf . Instead he became a professor at the University of Planning Economics in Berlin-Karlshorst , at the same time lecturer and consultant in the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the SED and a member of the Scientific Council of the Museum for German History Berlin . As a historian, he dealt primarily with the history of the German left before the First World War and the KPD. On May 6, 1955, he was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver.

plant

According to Jürgen Schröder's judgment, Lindau made a significant contribution to the establishment of Marxist-Leninist history in the GDR during the 1950s and 1960s. His presentation of history was dogmatically distorted and had features of Stalinist historiography. Nevertheless, his contributions had stood out from the increasingly dreary, already completely oriented party historiography of those years. For his planned Thälmann biography, Lindau had insisted on collecting exact material. His activities, in which he emphasized the socialist element of the November Revolution and wanted to see the existence of a left wing in the KPD during the years 1919 to 1923, were viewed with increasing suspicion. In 1961/62 he clashed with Hanna Wolf . While Lindau criticized the rejection of the scientific opinion dispute, pressure was put on him in the Institute for Marxism-Leninism and party proceedings were initiated. His book Revolutionary Battles 1918/19 from 1958 was criticized by Heinz Wohlgemuth on request. Lindau was accused of overestimating the role of the left-wing radicals in relation to the Spartacus group and thus questioning Lenin's assessment. Lindau, who is considered stubborn, refused, unlike other attacked historians, to exercise self- criticism and to represent the official point of view. He was not taken into account for the collective of authors on the history of the German labor movement (1966). It was not until Erich Honecker took office that Lindau raised his hopes again, especially since his brother-in-law Horst Sindermann held high offices.

Together with a small group of like-minded people, Lindau promoted the organization of historical seminars and institutes in the GDR according to the SED's guidelines. The "guild" of GDR historians was initially by no means in the Marxist tradition. According to Lothar Mertens , Lindau - similar to Horst Bartel , Walter Bartel , Karl Bittel and Albert Schreiner - lacked the necessary technical competence, so that he was even viewed within the party as a pure propagandist with the others mentioned. Jürgen Schröder sees in him a dogmatist who has retained the rudiments of a radical socialist self-image and who knew how to skillfully use his nimbus as a party veteran.

tomb

His urn was in the grave conditioning Pergolenweg the memorial of the socialists at the Berlin Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde buried, where his wife Eva born Sindermann is buried.

literature

  • Dieter Lent : Lindau, Rudolf. In: Horst-Rüdiger Jarck and Günter Scheel (eds.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon: 19th and 20th centuries. Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 1996, ISBN 3-7752-5838-8 , p. 384.
  • Jürgen Schröder: Rudolf Lindau (1888–1977) . In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism 1997, pp. 271–293.
  • Short biography in: Hermann Weber: The change of German communism. The Stalinization of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. Volume 2 . Frankfurt / Main 1969, pp. 208-209.
  • Short biography for:  Lindau, Rudolf . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Commons : Rudolf Lindau  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jürgen Schröder: Rudolf Lindau (1888–1977) . In: JHK 1997, p. 273.
  2. ^ Jürgen Schröder: Rudolf Lindau (1888–1977) . In: JHK 1997, p. 288 f.
  3. ^ Lothar Mertens: Priest of the Klio or court chronicler of the party? Collective biographical analyzes of the GDR historians , V & R unipress, Göttingen 2006, p. 125, ISBN 3-89971-307-9 .
  4. ^ Jürgen Schröder: Rudolf Lindau (1888–1977) . In: JHK 1997, p. 293.
personal data
SURNAME Lindau, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Graetz, Rudolf (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician and historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 28, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Riddagshausen
DATE OF DEATH October 18, 1977
Place of death Berlin