Walter Wimmer (historian)

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Walter Wimmer (born November 14, 1930 in Weißenfels ) is a German historian.

Life

Wimmer joined the SED in 1948 , having previously been a member of the FDJ . After graduating from high school in 1949, he began studying history , German language and literature , philosophy and education at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg , from which he graduated in 1953 as a historian. After that, Wimmer worked at the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute (later Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED - IML) in East Berlin until it was dissolved. In July 1962, the Humboldt University in Berlin received his doctorate with a thesis on the coup d'état of July 20, 1932 in Prussia .

From 1964 to 1968 Wimmer was deputy editor-in-chief, from 1969 to 1972 editor-in-chief and from 1972 to 1990 member of the editorial board of the magazine Contributions to the History of the Labor Movement . Since 1973 he has been a full professor at the IML. From 1978 to 1989 Wimmer was deputy head of the history department of the German labor movement.

As part of his decades of activity at the IML, Wimmer was involved in the party's official overall presentation of the history of the German labor movement and the SED. In his memoirs, the GDR researcher Hermann Weber referred to Wimmer as one of the SED's “chief historians”.

From November 1989 Wimmer belonged to the working group "Victims of Stalinism", which was formed at the IML, which has since been renamed the "Institute for the History of the Labor Movement" (IGfA) and published its results in 1991 in the volume In the Fangs of the NKVD .

Wimmer was a member of the Presidium of the GDR Historians 'Society and a member of the GDR's joint historians' commissions with Hungary, Romania and Poland.

Publications

  • The Works Council Act of 1920 and the massacre before the Reichstag . (= Contributions to the history and theory of the labor movement, issue 11). Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1957
  • The coup d'état of July 20, 1932 against the Prussian government Braun-Severing and its history . Humboldt University, Berlin 1962
  • Editorial collective (led by Walter Wimmer): Ideas that change the world. A Lenin Reader . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1970
  • (Deputy head of the collective of authors): Ernst Thälmann. A biography. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1979
  • German communists on the party. Articles and speeches 1918-1939 . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1980
  • with Ruth Wimmer: Fight Fascism! Thalmann 1929-1933 . Urania-Verlag, Leipzig 1986
  • with Ruth Wimmer (ed.): Peace certificates from four millennia . Urania-Verlag, Leipzig 1987
  • with Günter Hortzschansky : Ernst Thälmann. Short biography (= series of publications history. ). Dietz, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-320-01066-2

literature

  • Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic . KG Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X . , Pp. 642f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ History of the German labor movement in eight volumes . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1966.
  2. ↑ History of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (outline) . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1978.
  3. ↑ Hermann and Gerda Weber: Life according to the “left principle”. Memories from five decades. Links, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-86153-405-3 , p. 246.
personal data
SURNAME Wimmer, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Weissenfels