Obituary of historian Wolfgang Leonhard – The Melancholy of witnesses – Süddeutsche.de

By Willi Winkler

He wrote “The Revolution dismisses their children” a postwar Bestsellers: Now is the historian Wolfgang Leonhard, a revolutionary and sought-after expert on the Soviet Union, has died.

In his last self-criticism he was no longer afraid. They wanted to interrogate him because, not communists, but only apparatchiks were but. The real communists were those “who defend themselves against a subordination to the Soviet Union, against the inhuman methods of spying.”

Wolfgang Leonhard was appointed apparatchik. In 1921 he was born, son of a journalist and a writer in Vienna. His biological father was the Ambassador of the still very young Soviet Union, a confidant of Lenin, whose first name was Vladimir passed a mandate to the child. As a born communist, the young Leonhard believed of course in socialism, he wanted to build a new world, despite Stalin and together with the glorious Soviet Union. He grew up in the Berlin artist colony at Breitenbachplatz and fled after the Nazi seizure of power with his mother to Moscow. With the ability to suffer the true believers he accepted the show trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact. He endured it, that his mother was deported to Siberia, and went to the party school. Early on, he practiced in propaganda, spoke on the radio for the anti-fascist “National Committee for a Free Germany” and was determined a new Germany build the emigrants, Communists and Jews.

A week before the surrender, on 30 April in 1945, he landed with the “Ulbricht Group” near Berlin, where a discrete Soviet-supported takeover took place. He was willing to be honest, he later wrote, “to do everything in my power to meet the party tasks put to me exemplary”. That soon the familiar from the Hotel Lux paranoia reason of state was in the Soviet-occupied zone, he did not want to endure. At the Party School of the SED he had tried at least introduce a discussion on different ways to socialism, but after four years he fled to Yugoslavia, which had just seceded from the Soviet hegemony in the West. Leonard was awarded a scholarship in England, was teaching at Yale University later and remained for decades a sought-after expert for the hard concrete Soviet hegemony

in 1955 appeared in Kiepenheuer & amp. Malevich “The Revolution dismisses their children”. It was one of those books whose titles were proverbial. Leonhard’s revelations were recorded so grateful – the report was one of the largest book successes of the postwar period – that most of the melancholy train escaped it. It was also a lament for a lost hope in world history.

The revolutionary Wolfgang Leonhard died Sunday after a long illness in Daun in the Eifel. He was 93 years old.