Susanne Miller

Susanne Miller (born Susanne Strasser: 14 May 1915 – 1 July 2008) was a Bulgarian-born left wing activist who for reasons of race and politics spent her early adulthood as a refugee in England. After 1945, she became known in West Germany as a historian.

Life

Early years Susanne Miller was born in Sofia in May 1915, less than a year after the outbreak of the First World War. Her family, originally of Jewish provenance, was prosperous and conservative. Her father, Ernst Strasser, was a banker: her mother, Margarete/Margit Strasser (born Rodosi), gave birth to the Strassers' second child, Georgina, approximately twenty months after Susanne's birth. In 1919, however, the girls' mother died as a result of the 1918/20 influenza pandemic. When she was five Susanne was baptised as a Protestant,

Around 1920/21 Ernst Strasser married again. By his new wife, born Irene Freund, Susanne and Georgina quickly acquired two more half-siblings, Erika and Edgar. It was in Sofia, still aged only 17, that Susanne Strasser passed her School Certificate (Matriculation / Abitur) exam. Nelson was heavily influenced by neo-Kantianism. His socialism was based not so much on the historical materialism of Karl Marx, as on simple ethical motivation. Young Horace Miller was also the boyfriend of Renate Saran, a fellow refugee from Nazi Germany and the daughter of Susanne's ISK comrade and friend Mary Saran, but Renate when reporting the matter later, made light of this. Mrs.Miller spent the Second World War in London. Some of the normally public records of her activities during that time have still not been disclosed by the British authorities.

Miller became a member of London's community of socialist exiles from Germany. Others included Willi Eichler who arrived in London from Paris shortly before the outbreak of war. The ISK chairperson Minna Specht also lived and worked in London during the war years. except during the period when she was officially identified as an enemy alien and interned on the Isle of Man. Another of the ISK leaders in London was Maria Hodan. Miller herself presented a series of lectures to women from the English Cooperative Movement and from the National Council of Labour. The lectures generally concerned events on the European mainland, and in particular in Nazi Germany. In 1944 she stopped working in her friends' vegetarian restaurant in order to work full-time, together with Willi Eichler, on political matters. Fears of a German invasion of England had receded after the Battle of Britain 1940: the political work that preoccupied Eichler and Miller included drafting policy papers and speeches for a postwar Germany. She was particularly moved by the murders by the Soviets in 1942 and 1943 of Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich.

Germany War ended in May 1945, and Susanne Miller accompanied Willi Eichler back to what remained of Germany, settling initially in Cologne which was in the country's British occupation zone, and where Eichler was appointed editor in chief of the revived Rheinische Zeitung (newspaper). During this time she was working with other leading SPD politicians such as Herta Gotthelf, Elisabeth Selbert, Luise Albertz, Annemarie Renger and Louise Schroeder. She was responsible, together with Marianne Kühn, for planning the lecture programme: those accepting invitations to address the Socialist Education Association included Wolfgang Leonhard und Heinrich Böll. In addition, Susanne Miller was one of those involved in recreating in Bonn the Philosophical-Political Academy, which re-emerged in 1949 after a sixteen-year hiatus. The Academy, of which Susanne Miller served as president between 1982 and 1990, continued to promote the political philosophical insights of Leonard Nelson long after Nelson's death in 1927.

In 1951 Susanne Miller and Willi Eichler relocated a short distance upriver from Cologne to Bonn. In May 1949 three of the four postwar military occupation zones of Germany had been merged and relaunched as the German Federal Republic (West Germany), a US sponsored new kind of Germany, politically and increasingly physically separated from what in May 1949 was still administered as the Soviet occupation zone, surrounding Berlin. Bonn had become the de facto capital of the new West German state. Eichler had become a salaried member of the SPD leadership, located in Bonn. Shortly after the two of them moved to Bonn Miller was also appointed to a salaried position with the party. After the 1953 General Election, in which the SPD lost badly, Eichler chaired the party commission charged with drawing up a new programme for the party. Susanne Miller was an exceptionally close observer of the process that ensued because she attended the commission meetings and took the minutes. She received her doctorate in 1963 for a piece of work, which was subsequently adapted and published as a book, on the development of the Party Programmes for Social Democracy in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century. In this study she analysed the evolution of a Social Democratic party programme, starting with Ferdinand Lassalle's General German Workers' Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein / ADV) of 1863, and tracking through to Eduard Bernstein and the Revisionist Struggles of the 1890s. She dedicated this work to her friend, Minna Specht. She worked at this non-university research institute right through till 1978. Initially she worked with "source works". One of these was the war-diary of the SPD Reichstag deputy Eduard David. Her next project at the institute was a source volume on the 1918/1919 Council of the People's Deputies. Her study of the development of the Social Democratic Party memorably entitled "Civil Peace and Class War" ("Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg") appeared in 1974 and has become, for some, a "standard work" on its subject. Her (even thicker) study of Social Democracy in the confused revolutionary aftermath of war and the founding years of what Hitler later lampooned as the Weimar Republic, followed in 1978, entitled "The Burden of Power" ("Die Bürde der Macht: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1918-1920").

With Heinrich Potthoff, in 1974 Susanne Miller, who had been widowed in 1971, produced a brief history of the SPD. The little book was intended to be used for internal party training purposes. In 2002, when the eighth edition appeared, the volume had expanded from its original 350 pages to 600 pages.

The politically engaged academic Between the early 1970s and the end of the 1990s Susanne Miller was active as a confidential lecturer for the party's Friedrich Ebert Foundation and as a member of the foundation's committee responsible for decisions on bursary awards. She had previously contributed to the foundation's activities as a frequent seminar leader and in a consultancy capacity. In addition she undertook a series of foreign study and lecture tours for the foundation, which on occasion took her as far afield as Japan, China, Israel and Poland. Susanne Miller was entirely open to this form of dialogue with representatives of the East German "socialist" party, but she was robustly intolerant of crimes and human rights violations for which she held the East German communists directly responsible. In this sense she expressly identified herself as an anti-communist.

In 1982 Peter Glotz, at that time the party's "Bundesgeschäftsführer", appointed Susanne Miller to head up the SPD Executive Historical Commission. The Historical Commission was being created on the initiative of Willy Brandt, at the time an iconic figure within and beyond the party. Susanne Miller was its first president. Under Miller's leadership a number of events and presentations were organised on recent German History, and various booklets and leaflets were produced in support of these. The most important of the events organised under Miller's commission presidency occurred in 1987, and was a public meeting in the foyer of the SPD's Erich Ollenhauer Building in Bonn. Those attending were given the chance to meet a number of leading East German historians. The idea was that the resulting exchanges should serve the shared "Inheritance of German History". West German media covered the conference intensively because an exchange of views focused on the direct ideological contrasts between western and eastern historians was seen to be very unusual. Direct scholarly confrontation with East German historians was not an entirely new experience for Miller herself, however, because she had experienced it since 1964 as a participant in the annual "International Conference of Historians of the Labour Movement" at Linz.

Beside her work for the various SPD party agencies, Miller also worked for West Germany's Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb / Federal Agency for Political Education). Together with Thomas Meyer she led a working group at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation which compiled a three volume teaching compendium on the history of the German labour movement. She herself contributed several chapters. She also sat as a member of the bpb's advisory board. She later insisted that she had succeeded, working together with representatives of the CDU and FDP (parties), in shaping and over many years following a bi-partisan approach to political education. She nevertheless eventually resigned from the bpb advisory board in 1992, asserting that party differences within it were making rational fact based discussion ever more difficult. In terms of contemporary press reports, SPD representatives on the board were themselves not necessarily entirely without blame for the breakdown of the bi-partisan approach.

By the time of German reunification, in 1990, Susanne Miller was 75, but she continued to serve the SPD. In 1996 she was appointed the chair her party's Working commission on previously persecuted Social Democrats (Arbeitsgemeinschaft ehemals verfolgter Sozialdemokraten / AvS).

Miller featured in the public arena because of her support and membership of the German-Israeli Society, Susanne Miller was among those who demanded that the German government and the German Economy pay reparations to World War II forced labour victims, and she bemoaned the failure of governments to take account of the expertise available from victims' groups. As well as supporting surviving Holocaust victims in private, towards the end of her life she also took part prominently in the discussions over the Berlin Holocaust Memorial.

Awards and honours In 1985 the regional government of North Rhine-Westphalia bestowed an honorary professorship on Susanne Miller, now aged 70. In 2004 the Bavarian Georg von Vollmar Academy awarded her their Waldemar von Knoeringen Prize in recognition of her services to the strengthening of democracy and of historical consciousness. The city council of Bonn named a new street after her in November 2013. On the centenary of her birth, in 2015 the Philosophical Academy (Philosophisch-Politische Akademie) and the SPD Archive Centre (Archiv der sozialen Demokratie) got together and held a symposium in Bonn on 25 June 2015 to honour her memory.