Wolfgang Leonhard

Wolfgang Leonhard (born 16 April 1921) is a German political author, historian, and expert on Communism.

Early years

Wolfgang (originally Wladimir ^[1]) Leonhard was born in Vienna as the son of writers Susanne and Rudolf Leonhard. His mother had been a close friend of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's, the German Communist leaders, and was an active Communist herself.^[1] At the time of Wolfgang's birth,however, his parents were already divorced, and his mother had married the Soviet ambassador to Austria, Mieczysław Broński, under Soviet law.^[2] Susanne Leonhard worked as head of the press department of the embassy.

From 1931 on Susanne Leonhard and her son lived in the "Artists' Colony" in Wilmersdorf, Berlin, the home of many left-wing intellectuals.^[3] Wolfgang attended Karl-Marx Grammar School and joined the youth organization of the Communist Party of Germany, the "Young Pioneers".

When Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Susanne Leonhard sent her son to a boarding school in Sweden. She visited him there in 1935, but during her visit her antifascist group in Germany was exposed, and she could not go back to Germany. She was not allowed to stay in Sweden either, so she made her 13-year-old son choose between exile in England and exile in the Soviet Union. He chose the Soviet Union.^[4]

In the Soviet Union

From 1935 to 1937 Leonhard attended Karl-Liebknecht School in Moscow, a school for the children of German and Austrian antifascists. A special children's home (children's home no. 6) had been established for such children, and Leonhard lived there from September 1936 to August 1939, when it was closed due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Afterwards Leonhard enrolled as a student at the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages.^[5]

1936 was the beginning of "The Great Purge", a period of arbitrary arrests and trials in the Soviet Union. Leonhard's mother was arrested by the secret police, NKVD, in October 1936, and had to do forced labour for the next 12 years, mainly in the camp of Vorkuta (see Gulag). With the help of Wilhelm Pieck, later President of the German Democratic Republic, Leonhard achieved her release in 1948.^[6]

After the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 the Germans there were deported to certain areas mainly in the south-east, and Leonhard had to go to Karaganda but was able to continue his teacher training. A year later he was sent to the Comintern school near Ufa. Some of his teachers and fellow students there were to be found in leading positions after 1945, such as Paul Wandel, Heinz Hoffmann and Markus Wolf in the GDR and Jakub Berman in Poland. The eldest son of Yugoslav partisan leader Josip Broz Tito, Zarko, also attended the Comintern school at the time.^[7]

Leonhard's final exams at the Comintern school in the summer of 1943 coincided with the dissolution of the Comintern and the closure of the school. He was now employed by the "National Committee for a Free Germany", an organization of prisoners of war and expatriates. First he worked for its weekly newspaper "Free Germany", whose editor-in-chief was Rudolf Herrnstadt.

Anton Ackermann, one of the leaders of the "National Committee", made Leonhard an announcer at the Committee's radio station, "Radio Free Germany".

In East Germany

Leonhard was chosen as a member of one of the two groups of German communists who were the first to return to Germany as soon as the Red Army had reached German territory. Each group consisted of ten members. The leader of Wolfgang Leonhard's group was Walter Ulbricht, later (from 1950 to 1971) Secretary-General of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, and their task was to organize the administration of the Soviet occupation zone. "It has to look democratic, but we must have control of everything," Ulbricht told them.^[8] Therefore deputy mayors and chief constables as well as heads of personnel departments and departments of education had to be Communists. Other administrative jobs could go to people of a different political persuasion in order gain support from as many groups as possible.

In the following years Leonhard continued to work for the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which became the Socialist Unity Party in April 1946 after the Social Democratic Party in the Soviet zone had been forced to merge with it. Among other things he was involved in journalism and political instruction. In September 1947 he became a lecturer in the history department of the party's college Karl Marx.

Escape to Yugoslavia

Like, for example, Anton Ackermann, Wolfgang Leonhard thought that the creation of a German socialist state could follow a more democratic pattern than the developments he had experienced in the Soviet Union. He had had his first critical thoughts and doubts about Stalinism as early as in 1936 when his mother was arrested.^[9] But his basic belief in Marxism-Leninism still persisted for many years.

A five-hour speech by Walter Ulbricht at the party college on April 16, 1948, finally convinced Leonhard that a different German way to socialism was not possible.^[10] In March 1949 he fled to Yugoslavia via Czechoslovakia. Yugoslavia had been expelled from Cominform, the successor organization of Comintern under Russian leadership, and was establishing its own independent type of socialism.

In Yugoslavia Leonhard was in charge of the German programmes of Belgrade Radio.

In the West

From Yugoslavia Wolfgang Leonhard then went on to West Germany, where he worked as a political writer and as an expert on Eastern Europe.

Academic career: After his postgraduate studies at St Antony's College, Oxford University, from 1956 to 1958, and his work as a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Russian Studies of Columbia University, New York, in 1963 and 1964, Professor Leonhard taught Russian history and the history of international Communism at Yale University from 1966 to 1987. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Michigan at Ann Arbor/USA and Mainz, Trier, Kiel, Chemnitz and Erfurt in Germany.^[11] Chemnitz University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1998. He is the author of numerous books and essays on Eastern Europe and Communism, and he gave countless talks on these subjects in places all over the globe, such as Tokyo, Bombay, Accra (Ghana) or Colombo (Sri Lanka).

Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder ("Child of the Revolution", 1955) was translated into many languages and was a world bestseller.^[12]

In 1987, when the then German president, Richard von Weizsäcker, visited the Soviet Union, Leonhard was able to return to that country for the first time since 1945. Afterwards he paid regular visits to Russia and other countries in Eastern Europe. He has also had meetings with a number of acquaintances from his life in Russia and East Germany.^[13] Several times he observed elections in Russia and also in Belarus and Ukraine for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.^[2]

Wolfgang Leonhard's wife, Elke Leonhard, was an SPD member of the Bundestag, the German parliament, from 1990 to 2005.

References

^ ^a ^b Du gehst in das Institut Nummer 99, interview with Wolfgang Leonhard in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 May 2005
^ ^a ^b http://www.cyranos.ch/doppel31.htm
^ http://www.kuenstlerkolonie-berlin.de/bewohner/leonhard.htm
^ Wolfgang Leonhard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder. Berlin (Ullstein) 1970, p. 6
^ Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, pp. 17 - 75
^ Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, pp. 426 f
^ Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, pp. 106 - 227
^ Cf. Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, p. 294
^ Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, p. 38
^ http://www.welt.de/politik/article774882/Wolfgang_Leonhard_Dissident_in_der_Eifel.html
^ http://www.uni-protokolle.de/nachrichten/id/8818/
^ http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/spektrum/98-1/tu40.html
^ http://www.kuenstlerkolonie-berlin.de/bewohner/leonhard.htm