Philosophy in East Germany (DDR) and the democratic opposition

A significant part of the history of the democratic movement within Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR after the German initials), has to do with philosophical disputes, which made people like Robert Havemann and Ernst Bloch significant symbols and leaders for those who wanted the DDR to take a more democratic direction. Their role is not as well known as the famous workers' revolt of 1953. But it is important.

In the early years of the Soviet occupation and then the DDR (Communist East Germany), general guidance on the direction and boudnaries of philosophical teaching and publication was set by three journals: Aufbau (1945-1958); Einheit (1946-1990), a Party journal of the SED, the East German Communist Party; and, Neue Welt (1946-1954), an English-language Soviet journal that gave definitive statements of current Soviet thinking on the topics covered.

A literary-philosophical journal called Sinn und Form began publication in 1949 and continues today. The Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie (DZfP) under the editorship of Wolfgang Harich began in 1953 also continuing until today was the main professional journal for philosophers in the DDR.

Wolfgang Harich (1923-1995)

As Hans-Christoph Rauh explains in Anfänge der DDR-Philosophie: Ansprüch, Ohnmacht, Scheitern (2001; Hrsg: Volker Gerhardt und Hans-Christoph Rauh), the emphasis in philosophy was on Marxism-Leninism as established by the Soviet Party line. The occupation and the founding of the DDR were during the height of Stalin's power, and his approved version was considered definitive. This is often referred to as Stalinism, though in the context of the philosophical disputes I find the term to be more confusing than helpful. The philosophy of Marx and Engels, known as dialectical materialis - abbreviated among DDR philosophers as "Diamat" - was taken as the fundamental description of society and even all of science. ("Hismat" referred to "historical materialism".) V. I. Lenin was credited with updating Marxism for the age of imperialism, which Lenin dated from the turn of the 20th century with two events in particular, the Spanish-American War and the Boer War. Stalin was said to have achieved the insight that socialism in the age of imperialism could be established in one country, where earlier Marxists had assumed that at least all of Europe would have to make a transition to socialism for the revolution to succeed.

It was more contemporary Soviet versions of Marxism that were taught in East German schools and universities in the early years, with particular emphasis given to Stalin's Foundations of Leninism and a philosophical section of the 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Short Course which Stalin took credit for writing himself, called Dialectical and Historical Materialism. The actual original texts of Marx and Engels were available but not used so much in the teaching or popularization of the official philosophy.

This reverence for the Marxist-Leninist outlook encompassed not just social theory but the natural sciences, as well. And since physics and other hard sciences had advanced considerably since the 19th century, that presented problems of its own in philosophy. How significant the repercussions were for science and technology themselves in the DDR, I've not seen estimated yet anywhere.

But it was problematic because the classical Marxist texts on the philosophy of science were scarce, since they had concentrated heavily on history, social theory and the politics of the moment. The two most significant ones were Friedrich Engels' Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (1877-78), better known simply as Anti-Dühring, and Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy (1909).

Eugen Karl Dühring (1833-1921) is mainly remembered today because his was the target of intense polemics by Engels in Anti-Dühring and by Friedrich Nietzsche in various places. I've read a couple of articles about Dühring's influence at the time that were interesting enough that I intend to do a separate post about him some time. He was influential in a school of thought known as "national economy". And his influence in the worker's movement was strong enough that Engels felt it necessary to do the series of articles on him that became Anti-Dühring. As the years went on, Dühring became more and more of a sectarian crank and a rancid anti-Semite.

In refuting various theories of Dühring's, Engels made some sweeping claims about the application of dialectical materialism to physical science. He continued that process in a fragmentary work first published in the 1920s as Dialectics of Nature, though portions were published earlier. As it became part of the official canon on which the Soviets were insisting in postwar East Germany, this theory implied among other things the infinite existence of matter. But Einstein's theory of relatively showed that the universe of spacetime did indeed have a limit. A philosophical framework that prevented scholars from fully exploring the theory of relativity had obvious problems. The dogmatic insistence on the applicability of "Diamat" to the natural sciences was problematic in other respects, as well, such as the insistence of a "reflection" theory of knowledge based on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism which viewed human knowledge as a strict reflection of objective physical reality.

The heaviness of the hand of official authority appears in a much less abstract way in the editor's declaration in the 4:5(1)/1956 edition of DZfP:

Die Auslieferung des vorliegenden Doppelheftes 5/6/1956 hat sich leider verzogert, da es sich nach der Inhaftierung des früheren Chefredakteurs und Mitherausgebers der Zeitschrift Harich als notwendig erwies, eine neue Redaktion zu bilden und die Arbeitsweise der Redaktion grundlegend zu verändern.

[The distribution of the present double edition 5/6/1956 has been interfered with because after the arrest of the previous chief editor and co-publisher of the journal, [Wolfgang] Harich, it turned out to be necessary to build a new editorial team and to change the work methods of the editorship in a basic way.]

Yes, having the editor imprisoned can cause all sorts of problems with publication!

Die Umbildung der früheren Redaktion war schon seit längerem dringend erforderlich, da Harich als Chefredakteur nicht gewillt war, die Zeitschrift in übereinstimmung mit ihrem ursprünglichen gesellschaftlichen Auftrag zu leiten und zu gestalten. Im Gegenteil, er ver-suchte besonders seit dem Friihjahr 1956 immer offensichtlicher, die Zeitschrift in den Dienst seiner antimarxistischen, revisionistiso.hen und direkt konterrevolutionaren Bestrebungen zu stellen.

[The resructuring of the previous editorial team had already been urgently required for a long time, because Harich as chief editor was not willing to lead and shape the journal in conformity with its original social mission. On the contrary, he attempted, especially since early 1956, ever more openly to place the journal into the service of his anti-Marxist, revisionist and directly counter-revolutionary efforts.]

Further translation: Harich was considered to be too friendly to "reform Communist" efforts like those that were taken to have encouraged the Hungarian revolt of 1956. It was true that in comparison to the prevailing SED line, Harich was more reform-oriented. But he was a Communist, Marxist-Leninist philosopher and remained so decades later when the SED and the DDR came to an end.

This is part of the challenge and the fascination of the history of the democratic movement within the DDR. Few of the activist groups and individual leaders who were prominent in the opposition that lead to the democratic revolution of 1989-90 became immediately prominent in the electoral politics that led to the unification of Germany in the 1990s. Opposition took the form of reform socialist, environmentalist, peace and religious groups. For most people, it seems counterintuitive that committed Communists could have played a major role in reform. But it shouldn't be surprising. After all, Mikail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union was the former head of the KGB and a committed Communist himself. His goal was not to bring down the Soviet Union. It was to reform it and democratize it.

Tags: ddr, east germany, wolfgang harich