Ernst Engelberg

Ernst Engelberg (5 April 1909 – 18 December 2010) was a German university professor and Marxist historian.

He made a particularly noteworthy contribution with his two-volume biography of Otto von Bismarck which in the view of at least one commentator represented a paradigm shift for historiography in the German Democratic Republic.

Life Provenance Ernst Engelberg was born into a family with well documented democratic revolutionary credentials. His grandfather Julius Engelberg (1829-1902) had taken to calling himself "von Engelberg" and joined a citizens' militia in the aftermath of 1848. Ernst Engelberg's father, (1862-1947), was a publisher and a left-wing activist, who in 1898 had founded the local Social Democratic Party association in Haslach. The family was politically aware, and even as an old man Wilhelm Engelberg delighted to proclaim himself a "democrat of 1848" ("Ich bin 48er Demokrat"). By the time his dissertation was completed, however, in 1934, régime change had come to Germany, and his old history tutor, Gustav Mayer (who was Jewish), had been sacked from his university posts and persuaded to immigrate to (at this stage) the Netherlands. Ernst Engelberg's turned out to be one of very few doctorates awarded for a Marxist dissertation under the Third Reich.

Writing more than eight decades later, Engelberg's son commended the independence demonstrated by the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin scholars awarding Ernst Engelberg his doctorate in defiance of the known political preferences of the ruling party. He also became a member of the recently established Geneva branch of the Institute for Social Research, where fellow academic luminaries in exile included Hans Mayer, Hans Kelsen and Max Horkheimer.

In 1940, thanks to the contacts of Max Horkheimer he was able to immigrate to Turkey. Between 1940 and 1947 he worked as a lecturer at Istanbul University. He tried without success to obtain permission to immigrate to the United States or Cuba.

The German Democratic Republic In East Germany, Engelberg took a teaching post at the Teaching Academy ("Pädagogische Hochschule") in Potsdam (subsequently subsumed into the University of Potsdam). The next year, 1949, Ernst Engelberg was appointed Professor for the "History of the German Labour Movement" at Leipzig University, where colleagues included Hans Mayer (an old comrade from their time in Geneva), Ernst Bloch and Walter Markov, along with Werner Krauß, Wieland Herzfelde and Hermann Budzislawski. In 1951, he was appointed Director of Leipzig's newly established Institute for the History of the German People (" Institut für Geschichte des dt. Volkes"), a post he held till 1960.

Further appointments at the vital interface between the academic and political worlds followed. In 1960 the (East) German Academy of Sciences appointed him as Director of its Institute for German History in succession to Karl Obermann. Between 1960 and 1980 Ernst Engelberg served as President of the National Committee of East German Historians ("Nationalkomitee der Historiker der DDR").

Unusually, his two-volume biography of Otto von Bismarck

The volumes appeared separately in 1985 and 1990. in Der Spiegel commending and respecting many of the biographer's insights, despite von Augstein's predicable and necessary caution over Engleberg's underlying Marxist contextualising.

Awards and honours 1964 National Prize of East Germany Class III 1974 Patriotic Order of Merit in gold 1979 Order of Karl Marx 1984 National Prize of East Germany Class I

In October 1989 Ernst Engelberg became the last recipient of the Outstanding People's Scholar ("Hervorragender Wissenschaftler des Volkes").