Volume 33, Number 14 · September 25, 1986
The Other Germany
By Gordon A. Craig
German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach
by Andreas Dorpalen
Wayne State University Press, 542 pp., $45.00
Bismarck, Urpreuße Und Reichsgründer
by Ernst Engelberg
Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 839 pp., DM48
East Germany and Détente: Building Authority After the Wall
by A. James McAdams
Cambridge University Press, 233 pp., $34.50
Geschichte Der DDR.
by Hermann Weber
Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 540 pp., DM19.80
"Und Willst Du Nicht Mein Bruder Sein…" Die DDR Heute
by Timothy Garton Ash
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 208 pp., DM16
In 1957 and 1958, several historians in the German Democratic Republic, in a discussion of the November Revolution of 1918, described it as an aborted socialist revolution. This touched off a controversy that eventually reached the highest levels of government, leading to the intervention of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity party (SED) and a stern pronouncement by its first secretary Walter Ulbricht, who said that the definition in question was not only historically inaccurate but politically dangerous. Because no strong revolutionary class existed in 1918, Ulbricht announced, and because the rising had not been led by a revolutionary party, it was not a socialist revolution at all, and to say so might raise doubts about the indispensability of a Marxist-Leninist party (like, although he did not say this, the SED).
Review, 3763 words
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