Wolfgang Leonhard (1921-2014)
The essence of Stalinism already opened up the young emigrants in Moscow. However, the drastic experience brought from the August 1939 Wolfgang Leonhard at this time not to, to opt out of the system that had taken him seemingly caring and his mother. The young German Communist, born 1921 in Vienna, experienced in almost exactly 75 years ago that disappeared from one day to the other anti-fascist literature from the Moscow bookstores, because Josef Stalin, the “father of nations”, with Adolf Hitler signed a non-aggression pact had. Astonished, he witnessed how seasoned officers as suddenly their “opinion” about Germany and its leaders changed. This story is one of the striking episodes from Leonard’s bestseller “The Revolution dismisses their children” in the West caused a sensation in the fifties.
How much Leonhard had prescribed the Stalinist system of total incapacitation of the individual, was the moment when the Soviet secret police his mother picked up, then disappeared for years in the Gulag, which she survived, unlike many others. The son was indeed irritated, but did not dispute that the mother, who had brought him in and perceived security against Hitler, must have done something wrong at some. Such a well-established “class position” used the Soviet Union Stalin’s reward. And so Wolfgang Leonhard was taken during the war in a school of the Communist International, where you trained him for future leadership roles in Germany. Meanwhile Hitler’s Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and the anti-fascist world was back in order.
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After the official course Leonhard worked as an editor and spokesman for the sender of the “National Committee for a Free Germany”, the on behalf of German prisoners of war made propaganda against the Nazis. During the training, he had also met Markus Wolf, among others, which should make the Ministry of State Security of the GDR later career.
Leonhard belonged to the group of German communists, led by Walter Ulbricht, who were brought to Germany before the end of hostilities in the spring of 1945. Its members worked to develop functioning administrations in the controlled part of Berlin by the Red Army. For absolutely had to be found “bourgeois” experts. Leonhard quoted again and again a principle that they’ve taught Ulbricht in later years. “It has to look democratic, but we must have everything under control.”
© dpa 2004 receives Wolfgang Leonhard the European Science Culture Prize from the hands of former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher
2004 receives Wolfgang Leonhard the European Science Culture Prize from the hands of the former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher
When he told this, Leonhard had long broken with the “real existing socialism”. About Yugoslavia, he came to the West, where he was a sought-after expert on all matters of international communism, which always was happy and captivating for the audience information. Until 1987, he taught more than two decades at the American University Yale on the subject of his life. Previously, he had worked in Oxford and at Columbia University in New York.
The reform policies of Mikhail Gorbachev fascinated Leonhard. His analysis suggested in 1994 in the book “The reform dismisses their fathers’ down. After the collapse of the Soviet Union Leonhard was repeated as an election observer in several former Soviet republics active.
© dpa Wolfgang Leonhard (left) talking ish with Ralph Giordano and Rupert Neudeck 1997 at the funeral of the Russian writer Lev Kopelew
Wolfgang Leonhard (left) talking ish with Ralph Giordano and Rupert Neudeck 1997 at the funeral of the Russian writer Lev Kopelew
In recent past it was not as present as in the past for television viewers. But the last time he witnessed the events from before and after 1945 enjoyed a spirited public speaker and interlocutor continued popularity. He spent his last years with his wife Elke in Manderscheid in the Eifel. On Sunday Wolfgang Leonhard has died at the age of 93 years in a hospital in Daun in the Eifel.
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