Hermann Weber

Hermann Weber (born Mannheim 23 August 1928: died 29 December 2014) was a German Historian and Political scientist. A few days after he died a headline writer described him as "the man who knew everything about the German Democratic Republic".

Early years

Hermann Weber was born into a working-class family in the closing years of what would later become known as the Weimar Republic period. His father was a metal worker. When the son was 4 years old membership of the Communist Party became illegal in Germany. This affected the family because Weber's father was a Communist who found himself harassed and at one stage thrown into prison for a year and a half by the Gestapo.

Young communist

He joined the Communist Party himself in 1945. Early in 1946 he attended a four-week course near Berlin organised by the Free German Youth (FDJ / Freie Deutsche Jugend) which was in effect the newly created youth wing of the no longer illegal German Communist Party. In June of that year he was a delegate to the FDJ's first parliament, and met the FDJ president, a man called Erich Honecker. His home city had been largely destroyed by bombing, but at the end of the war it had ended up in the US occupation zone. However, in 1947 Weber went back to the Soviet occupation zone in the east of what remained of Germany and spent the two years till 1949 as a student at the "Karl Marx" Party Academy in Berlin. A fellow student was Herbert Mies, also from the Mannheim area. To his initial irritation, the ruling political party in the Soviet occupation zone insisted that Weber study under a pseudonym, and they chose "Hermann Wunderlich". Later he would joke that he had been disappointed because the authorities had not permitted him to call himself "Walter", and in 2002 he even published a volume of memoirs under the ironically selected title "Damals, als ich Wunderlich hieß" ("Back then, when they called me Wunderlich"). It was as a student at the "Karl Marx" Academy that he met his future wife, Gerda Röder.

Back in the Federal Republic

In 1949 he was sent back to what had now become the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), formally established in May 1949 from a combination of the three occupation zones hitherto under US, British and French control. He became editor in chief of the FDJ-Zeitung, a newspaper based at this stage in Frankfurt and aimed at young West Germans. He was very soon demoted to the position of Culture Editor on the newspaper by the FDJ chief Erich Honecker because he had given insufficient prominence to a telegramme received from Stalin: Stalin's message had very properly appeared on the front page, but only in a small box. Despite the demotion, Weber continued the political struggle against the "Revanchist Adenauer state". He was arrested in March 1953 and taken into investigative custody after the FDJ was designated a banned organisation in the west. The year was one of increased east-west tension, with a significant uprising violently crushed in East Germany in June. Two months later, still detained, Hermann Weber spent his 25th birthday in a prison in Essen. He was released later in 1953, but in 1954 he was expelled from the German Communist Party. In 1955 he joined West Germany's "moderate left" SPD (party), though he would always be regarded as part of the party's left wing.

Settling down (a little) as an academic

Between 1964 and 1968 Weber studied at Marburg and Mannheim, obtaining his doctorate after only four years. Habilitation followed in 1970 and an "extraordinary professorship" in 1973. This represented an exceptionally rapid progression, which reflected both Weber's talents and many years, when a younger man, of relevant learning and experience. At the "Karl Marx Party Academy" in the late 1940s Hermann and Gerda Weber had been part of an elite group of students: guest lecturers had included Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, Otto Grotewohl, Anton Ackermann, Fred Oelßner and Kurt Hager - men who had taken a lead role in creating the German Democratic Republic, which was now Weber's own field of study. His youngest professor at the party academy and, he believed, among the best of them, had been Wolfgang Leonhard who himself had subsequently defected to the west and become, like Weber, a notable academic expert on East Germany: the two remained friends despite robustly held professional differences. Hermann Weber served as Professor for Political Sciences and Contemporary History at the University of Mannheim from 1975 till his formal retirement in 1993. In 1981 he founded the university's Research division on German Democratic Republic (GDR) History, while producing a succession of well regarded publications on aspects the GDR, many of which became much cited standard works.

Post retirement career

Weber remained a board member of the National Foundation for Re-assessment of the SED Dictatorship (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur). He was also an honorary member of the Joint Commission for research on recent German Russian relations.

In 1993 he founded the The year book for Historical Communism Research (JHK / Das Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung), an annual publication which he continued to edit till 2007.

Weber identified a highpoint of his research career as the discovery, in 1968, of the text of the original minutes of the Founding Congress of the German Communist Party. The record had been undiscovered for fifty years. Subsequently, East Germany's ruling SED (party) asserted that they had found it, and they showed little urgency in making it available. However, in 1972 the party's Institute for Marxism–Leninism published an edition which was unambiguously based on Weber's version.