Bernhard Steinberger

Bernhard Steinberger (17 September 1917 - 16 December 1990) was a communist German-Jewish engineer and economist. After 1945 he became an East German political dissident, spending most of the period between 1949 and 1960 in prison for his critique of what he saw as the SED's flawed approach to socialism. He had, by this time, already spent the war years accommodated in a succession of "emigrants' camps" in Switzerland, where he had arrived from Milan with his mother and sister in 1938 in order to escape the effects of newly introduced antisemitic legislation in Italy.

Biography Provenance and family Bernhard Steinberger was born in Munich where Dr. Max Steinberger, his father, worked as a prosecutor at the district courthouse. However, Bernhard's father died a couple of weeks after Bernhard was born. After the war his mother remarried which led to the birth of a sister five years younger than himself, but his mother's second marriage ended in divorce during the 1930s. After leaving school in 1934 he spent six months as a volunteer in an automobile repair shop before embarking on an engineering apprenticeship with Ertelwerk, a manufacturer of Precision mechanical products, in their factory in the western part of central Munich. He demonstrated a rare enthusiasm and talent for constructing model airplanes and dreamt of becoming an aviation technician or an aircraft designer. However, the National Socialist government which had taken power in 1933 were now enshrining in legislation the shrill racist rhetoric for which they had become noteworthy in opposition. The Steinbergers are described in sources as a family of secular or assimilated Jews: Bernhard's Jewish provenance made it unlikely that he would be offered a fulfilling job in the aviation industry, especially given the sector's important role in the government's re-armament plans. In July 1936, still aged only 18, Bernhard Steinberger emigrated to Milan, War broke out in September 1939. All the countries surrounding Switzerland participated directly in it apart from Liechtenstein. Switzerland was powerfully impacted. In March 1940 the Swiss parliament decided to revoke the blanket ban on paid employment being undertaken by "tolerated migrants" (refugees), but at the same time plans were set in train for the construction of labour camps to be administered by the police. In July 1940 Bernhard Steinberger was sent to the labour camp at Tamins, just outside Chur in Graubünden/Grisons. This turned out to be the first of six different labour camps in which he would successively be accommodated during the war. During that period he was able to obtain a work permit for work which he undertook as a designer for a total of twenty months. In the camps he came into close contact with German communists, and involved himself in some of their activities. That included trying to find ways to improve conditions in the camps and the establishment of the (very successful) "Emigrants' Cultural Community" ("Kulturgemeinschaft der Emigranten in Zürich e.V."). It also involved setting up (secretive) party cells and, as the war progressed, Free Germany groups in the camps. As the war approached its end Bernhard Steinberger was accepted into the German Communist Party at a conference held at Zürich in February 1945. In recognition of his participation in party work his membership was backdated to 1940. He prepared quickly for the appropriate state exams and made progress on a dissertation. Two weeks later she retracted that confession to an officer of the Soviet security services, but the retraction had no obvious effect. Otherwise, records indicate that Steinberger increasingly used his meetings with his handler to discuss his personal problems, and would then move on to discuss with outrageous candour the political and ideological questions which were bothering him. Naturally deep political-philosophical discussions were not included on the script of his Stasi handler who was unable to provide any very convincing answers. Because of all this, Steinberger's consciencously provided routine reports and assessments, along with the reports on him provided by other informants, led handlers to conclude that he was an irrascible and incurable "revisionist" and deviant who, because of his own experiences of harsh treatment by state agencies, could probably be expected to avoid going too far with his oppositional attitude.

In the absence of satisfactory results, it seems likey that it was in 1963 that HA V/2/II (military counterintelligence) reassigned "GI-Fritz" to "Abteilung (section) XX/6" of "City Administration Greater Berlin" (at that ime still within the ambit of the Stasi), as a "Sicherungs GI" (Security Secret Informant) at the Berlin Economics College ("Hochschule für Ökonomie ..."). From the point of view of the authorities this was not a satisfactory solution, since Steinberger refused to follow instructions in terms of reporting on the behaviours of individuals. On 3 April 1964 his hader reported that "In respect of many issues the GI shares the opinion of Havemann [a prominent government critic]. His ideologies gets closer and closer to those of class enemy. There are a lot of things he does not acknowledge ... With this GI you have to conduct constant ideological disputes". After 1967 his handlers reported that they kept only in "loose contact" with this informant, sufficient only to ascertain Steinbergrer's own opinions about political developments. So the files show the Stasi in 1968 recording Steinberger's "negative attitude" over the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. On 17 February 1969 "Abteilung (section) XX/6" gave up on their troublesome GI and their files on and from "GI Fritz" were archived.

Struggling for a return to "normality" After his release from detention at the end of 1960 Steinberger worked, for approximately six months, at VEB Elektro-Mechanik in Berlin as a "Technisch begründete Arbeitsnorm (TAN) Berarbeiter", responsible for ensuring product conformity to prescribed standards. He quickly became a TAN group leader, remaining in post till agreement had been reached over his longer term professional future.

Following consultation with the Secretary of State at the Ministry for Higher Education it was agreed that the pre-doctoral work that Steinberger had undertaken while in detenention on the "Wachstumsgesetze der sozialistischen erweiterten Reproduktion" provided sufficient evidence of Steinberger's suitability for an academic post. He was advised to apply to the Economics College ("Hochschule für Ökonomie ") in Berlin-Karlshorst. With the agreement of both the Secretary of State and of the party central committee, on 16 June 1961 he accepted an appointment as a research assistant at the college's Institute for Popular Economic Planning ("Institut für Volkswirtschaftsplanung"). However, the path to a conventional academic career remained blocked by a clause in the court judgment he had received on 9 March 1957, which had stipulated that Steinberger "should not be active in the public service nor in any leading function in economics or the arts". Accordingly, on 2 September 1961 Steinberger applied to the East German Prosecutors' office for "remission of the punitive measures". based on undertakings he had received in connection with the "Gnadenerweis" (loosely, "mercy certificate") on which his release from custody at the end of 1960 had been based. In addition to the lifting of the restrictions on his right to progress his academic career, he also sought restoration of his right to vote and stand for election.

In pursuit of restorative justice Two years later, on 20 January 1963, Steinberger turned to the Prodecutor's Office with an application for the punishment to be struck out. In a detailed submission in support he starts with the way on which he was already defamed in the party mass-circulation newspaper, Neues Deutschland, on 1 December 1957. He had already been punished for actions against peace, which was clearly unjustified. Only on 16 May 1963 did he receive a confirmation from the chief prosecutor that the conviction had indeed been struck out from the Punishments Register on 9 May 1963, subject to the consent of Central Department IX of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), which was inferred from a characteristic one word note ("Einverstanden" ("Agreed")) added personally by the Stasi boss, Erich Mielke.

On the day he applied to the Prosecutor's Office to have his punishment struck out Steinberger also lodged a claim for restitution with the State Council (Staatsrat). The claim concerned six and a third years of detention while not guilty, and the loss of property in connection with the Rajk affair which had erupted in 1949 in the People's Republic of Hungary. Back in March 1958 his wife had already, through her lawyer, received notification from the Leipzig city authorities that furniture which the family had acquired by means of a loan agreement had been withdrawn at some point following the couple's arrest in 1949. She had been informed through the same intermediary that there existed "no record" concerning the whereabouts of their other assets, such as household goods, books, clothes and personal papers. Everything they had possessed at the time of their arrest was "unfindable", as though there never had been a Steinberger family living in Leipzig. Steinberger pursued the matter with the authorities again in 1963 despite being advised by his Stasi handler, with whom at this point he was still in regular contact as an informant ("Geheim Informant"), that he had forfeited any claim he might have had for compensation over his detention as an innocent man through his "hostile actions against the German Democratic Republic" (wegen seine "feindlichen Handlungen gegen die DDR").

Return to teaching On 18 April 1963 Bernhard Steinberger finally received a communication from the secretary of state that the authorities were "in agreement with his commitment to teaching" ("Einsatz in der Lehrtätigkeit einverstanden"). The threat to his future academic career from the stipulation in his sentence back on 9 March 1957 that he "should not be active in the public service nor in any leading function in economics or the arts" appeared to have been lifted. On 24 April 1963, after discussions with future colleagues at the college Steinberger reluctantly but definitively withdrew his claims for restitution: "I will not disguise the fact that my decision to draw a line under the events of 1949-1955 is a difficult one. But my desire to live in harmony with the party to which I feel I belong was decisive. Future developments would make a mockery of his reasoning here. Steinberger's strong reservations about the party leadership of Comrades Ulbricht and Honecker continued to underpin his political attitudes. The party advised him later during the 1960s that his expulsion from it had become irrevocable.

There were more disappointments and indignities, but during the later 1960s he was nevertheless able to make progress with his academic career. In 1963 Steinberger lodged his (first) application for restoration of his recognition as a victim of National Socialist persecution. He had to wait till December 1967 before that status was re-conferred. In February 1964 he was required to break off work on a research project he was undertaking for the National Planning Commission. Then, after lodging a complaint with the State Council (Staatsrat), he was permitted a two year research contract with the Economics Research Institute of the National Planning Commission. The subject of his researches was work-force planning in the context of overall long-term economic planning ("Volkswirtschaftliche Bilanzierung und langfristige Planung der Arbeitskräfte"). He was able to incorporate this work into a dissertation entitled "Grundlagen der prognostischen und perspektivischen zentralen Arbeitskräfte- und Bildungsplanung" in return for which he finally received a doctorate, two days after his fiftieth birthday, on 19 September 1967. The assessors awarded his work a "summa cum laude" commendation.

On 1 June 1970 Steinberger accepted a professorship in Socialist Economics, over the next seven years, till his retirement in 1977, his focus was entirely on teaching. He planned to research and obtain his habilitation, a higher academic qualification generally seen as a way to reinforce a professional career in the universities sector. However, his plans for a suitable dissertation, submitted in 1974, were not accepted. During the surging wave of social and political changes that were a feature of 1989/90 Bernhard Steinberger became a Berlin-based advisor to New Forum.

A final appeal for justice Developments during the 1980s did much to vindicate Bernhard Steinberger's long-standing diagnoses of the East German economic model. In those countries were the Soviet sponsored states of Eastern Europe had traditionally been able to trade East Germany had during the 1960s and 1970s enjoyed a near monopoly in heavy engineering and other "technical" manufacturing sectors, but during the 1980s, as heavy industry in the Soviet Union began to modernise, East German salesmen in shared export markets began to encounter Soviet comrades not as partners but as commercial rivals. Increasingly dependent on variously disguised West German subsidies, the country was running out of cash and credit. After 1985 Winds of change blowing across from, of all places, the Moscow Kremlin left East Germany's increasingly geriatric political leaders feeling isolated and uncertain about the future (although their commitement to "traditional" socialism appeared solid). When street protesters breached the Berlin Wall in November 1989 it quickly became clear that Soviet troops standing by had received no orders to intervene on behalf of the status quo. There would be no repeat of 1953. Events assumed their own momentum. That was the context in which, on 15 January 1990, Bernhard Steinberger saw an opportunity to renew his campaign for justice with an application to the High Court in East Berlin for the "revision of the judgments against Harich, Steinberger and Hertwig". He summarized again his reform ideas from 1956, which had simply revolved around the increasingly mainstream goals for a de-Stalnized socialist party and the establishment of a democratic East German state.

On 28 March 1990 the High Court quashed the sentence from 9 March 1957. By this time Steinberger was seriously ill, however, and was unable to attend the court. Bernhard Steinberger died in Berlin on 16 December 1990, slightly more than three months after reunification.