In neoliberal historiography, the recommended approach to discussing Jews in the people’s republics is to portray them as passive objects with almost no agency whatsoever, apart from fleeing towards occupied Palestine or some other Western utopia. Things simply happen to them: they become pangender damsels in distress who can do nothing other than (attempt to) escape to “Israel” the microsecond that the opportunity becomes available, where they’ll presumably live happily ever after just like in a fairy tale.
Although it may be a lousy idea for a general web search, looking up “Jewish communists” on a search engine dedicated to peer‐reviewed journals can provide some useful results, because the very concept clashes with the anticommunist objectification of Jewish people. This work by Pól Ó Dochartaigh, though still fairly liberal, gives us a sorely needed look at the complexity of one people’s republic’s relationship with Jews:
Helmut Eschwege was born in Hannover in 1913 into an Orthodox Jewish family and was schooled in a Talmud Torah school in Hamburg, though at an early age he rejected religion in favour of socialism. In 1929 he joined the SPD and the Reichsbanner Schwarz‐Rot‐Gold, a paramilitary organisation for the defence of democracy in the Weimar Republic. He remained a member until both were banned after the [Third Reich] came to power in 1933.¹
In 1934 Eschwege emigrated via Denmark to Estonia and in 1937 to Palestine, where he joined the Communist Party of Palestine, and from 1942 he served in the British Army. As a Jewish communist Eschwege rejected Zionism and was highly critical of Jewish settler attitudes to Arabs. He made no secret of his desire to leave Palestine.²
In 1946 Eschwege returned to Germany via Prague and Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary). He joined the SED and, through contacts, played a significant part in transferring Jewish book collections from Prague to Dresden, books which in 1952 were acquired by the GDR’s Museum für Deutsche Geschichte in Berlin, and Eschwege moved to work there, while he remained living in Dresden.
Though trained as a ‘Kaufmann’, Eschwege became a historian of Jewish and German–Jewish themes. The GDR authorities made his research difficult, however; in 1953 he resigned his post in the museum before he could be dismissed, and in 1958 he was expelled from the SED. Nevertheless, he built up a significant international reputation as an historian, and was involved in Christian–Jewish dialogue in the GDR. He died in 1992 in Dresden, having been a founding member of the East German Social Democratic Party in early 1990.
[…]
That a whole series of German–Jewish political exiles returned to Germany after 1945 and went to the Soviet Zone has been well documented.²¹ Some are better known than others, especially those who held high political office such as Albert Norden, Alexander Abusch, Hermann Axen, though even they were subjected to suspicion and temporary demotions in the early 1950s. One lesser‐known figure whose biography is similar to that of Abusch, because he was in exile in both France and Mexico, is Erich Jungmann.
Jungmann (1907–86) was born into a working‐class Jewish family in Reichenberg, Saxony. He joined the KPD in 1928, was elected to the Reichstag in November 1932, arrested by the [anticommunists] in 1933 and emigrated in 1934 to the Soviet Union. He was active in communist circles in Amsterdam (1935–37) and Paris (1937–39), interned in Vichy (1939–42) and fled to Mexico (1942–46). He returned to Germany and, after a brief sojourn in Frankfurt/Oder was sent to the British Zone as a KPD functionary.
Recalled to the GDR in 1951 he was caught up in the charges that derived from the Slanský Trial in Czechoslovakia (Fieldism, Titoism, Trotskyism) but, after a brief period in internal exile in Karl‐Marx‐Stadt returned to Berlin, rose through the ranks and was secretly rehabilitated in 1956. He served as Secretary of the KPD Central Committee, and retired in 1976 after almost five years as Director of Radio Berlin International.²²
According to archival material found by Wolffsohn’s team of researchers, Jungmann secured his own safety by incriminating Alexander Abusch, among others.²³ Jungmann’s Jewishness was almost incidental in his own life, yet clearly not to the SED in the early 1950s. This communist who had been subjected to discrimination on account of his Jewish origins could have left the GDR at any time after 1954 until 1961. Yet he didn’t. His communist convictions apparently sat too deep.
Not all stayed, however. Leo Zuckermann (1908–85) was born into a Jewish family in Lublin and brought up in Wuppertal. He joined the SPD in 1927 and switched to the KPD in 1928. He trained as a lawyer, was an active communist, and served in the political leadership of the Jewish Workers’ Cultural Association in Wuppertal. He went to France in 1933, was interned in 1939 but fled to Mexico in 1941, via Marseille. In exile he was, on the instructions of the KPD, a member of the German–Jewish refugee organisation Menorah.²⁴
He returned to Germany in 1947 and joined both the SED and the Berlin Jewish Community. By 1950 this had become politically untenable, not least because he had risen to become the Chief of Wilhelm Pieck’s Office. He was assigned other senior duties until, in December 1952 in the wake of the Slanský Trial in Prague, he fled the GDR and settled once again in Mexico, where he worked as a jurist and academic.
According to his son he did not consider moving to [occupied Palestine] partly because of his wife’s security fears but also because of his ‘disapproval of the treatment of the Arab population as second‐class citizens’.²⁵ Zuckermann remained a communist and died in Mexico in 1985. In 1981 he had had a friendly meeting with Honecker in the GDR embassy in Mexico City. Zuckermann’s Jewishness was too important to him to tolerate the GDR’s antisemitism, yet he somehow retained friendly feelings toward the GDR thirty years after he fled.
Many of the Jewish writers who went to the GDR after 1945 have been considered extensively elsewhere. Most of them wrote about Jewish themes at least some of the time, though with varying degrees of openness. Anna Seghers’ first post‐war novel, Die Toten bleiben jung,²⁶ though it puts antisemitic sentiments into the mouths of several negative characters, is not a novel on a Jewish theme, unlike some of her short stories, such as ‘Post ins Gelobte Land’, published in 1946.²⁷
It is not coincidental that the latter story was written in Mexiko, i.e. before Seghers return to Germany in 1947 and, though it was not included in a GDR Werkausgabe of 1951–53,²⁸ it certainly appeared in other short story collections.²⁹ Her 1924 PhD thesis on Jews in the works of Rembrandt was not published until 1981, just two years before her death.³⁰ Throughout her time in the GDR Seghers did not foreground Jewish themes in her writing.
She served as President of the GDR Writers’ Union 1952–78 and rarely criticised the GDR publicly, not even when her publisher, Walter Janka, was put on trial in 1957, even though her international fame as a writer may have allowed her more freedoms than were accorded many others. Indeed, according to Janka Seghers implicated ‘mit dubiosen Aussagen’ Paul Merker as a ‘Noel Field‐Agent’ in 1951.³¹
[…]
All of those considered thus far were adults and activists before the [Third Reich’s] assumption of power in 1933, and there are more, who similarly chose varying political paths in the GDR. They include the entirely conformist political propagandist and lawyer, Friedrich Karl Kaul, who had become active in oppositional circles in 1933 and had been in exile in Colombia, Nicaragua and the USA. After his return he made it his life’s work to link [Fascism] and antisemitism to post‐war western society and was a joint plaintiff in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963–66.³⁶
Rudolf Hirsch joined the KPD in 1931 and left Germany in 1938 for Palestine via Sweden. In Palestine he collaborated with Arnold Zweig. After his return to Germany in 1949 he became a court reporter. In the 1980s he published a novel about the Zionist bombing of a refugee ship, the Patria, which cost 250 Jewish refugees their lives in Haifa in 1940.³⁷ Together with his wife, Rosemarie Schuder, he also published an extensive study of antisemitism, for which they were awarded Nationalpreis der DDR in 1988.³⁸ Politically, he was not active.
(Emphasis added.)
As we can see, despite the author’s explicit recognition of Jewish agency, even he could not resist slipping in anticommunist tedium like ‘the evils of Stalinism’ and ‘the GDR’s antisemitism’. I can’t tell if this ritual is either an ideologic force of habit or a conscious decision made to appease publishers, but it comes across as artificial and suspiciously incongruous from somebody who is trying to write history maturely.
In any case, this is an acceptable starting point for learning about Jews in the German Democratic Republic.