Günter Benser – an integral person

“Of course I was wondering,” recalls Günter Benser of the dramatic, stormy weeks and months 1989/90, “whether it makes sense in this crisis of the GDR, which at the same time represented a crisis of her historical science that we were involved in, yes, yes, whether I was justified to continue my work as a historian. But then I said to myself: Why should those who have defeated their defeat to be less capable of critical analysis than those who still have their defeats? That’s why I commented on my responsibility a few times, but then rejected it to start every speech to the matter with an apology. “

In this sense, Günter Benser has brought himself into the attempt to redesign the social knowledge, with his immense historical knowledge, profound knowledge, profound judgment and an unshakable optimism in the attempt to redesign a social redesign, from a better, friendly, more fairer social state in German than that that adolescents turn back in a unique mass exodus in summer ’89 and the hundred thousand Disappointed, but not yet resigning citizens in the fall of the year drove the streets and squares of the cities and municipalities, expressed their immaturity and their will to change.

Günter Benser, born in 1931 in a family of workers in Heidenau, a small town in Saxon Switzerland, came to study history in Leipzig through the workers and farmers’ faculty. And was grateful throughout his life for the chance that he was committed to him with the German Democratic Republic, which was a worker-and-farmer state on October 7, 1949. He acquired his first scientific merits at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism (IML) at the ZK of the SED, which was not only a propaganda facility, as in retrospect. Serious research took place there, even if it was not completely reflected in the published editions.

Günter Benser researched and published on the history of the KPD and SED, was a co -editor of document volumes and author of the popular science “illustrated historical booklets”, member of the Council for History and the Historian Association of the GDR. His big hour hit the “turn”. He was elected almost unanimously by the employees as the new director of the IML, who renamed his aegis to the Institute of History of the Labor Movement (IFGA) -before the new, greedy SED real estate and money was chased up two years later, the so -called follow -up party in the land of the end.

When a reforming of the GDR had not yet been written off, everything still seemed possible – in the short time of utopia – Günter Benser did a remarkable manner. With colleagues, he published biographies of victims of the “Great Terror” in the Soviet Union of the 1930s/40s under Stalin as well as the repression in the SBZ, the Soviet occupation zone, and early GDR-the technical basis for the rehabilitation of Günther Wieland carried out by GDR general prosecutor.

Günter Benser was the decisive spring of the department “we irrevocably broken with Stalinism as a system” at the special party conference of the SED at the beginning of December ’89, “the founding document of the party of democratic socialism (PDS). He argued on public forums and in the media, including in this newspaper, for the term “compulsory association” of the KPD and SPD 1946, emphasized the conviction of many communists and social democrats at the time to finally overcome the ominous division of the labor movement leading into Hitlerism, but also referred to repressive moments and corrected earlier statements. And he also took a position on many other crises and turning points as well as possible alternatives in the history of the GDR and the real socialism of Soviet character in Eastern Europe. What Günter Benser National and International Recognition received.

His greatest merits include the rescue of the SED party archive, the foundation of the SAPMO, the Archive of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR, in the Federal Archives as well as the Archives and Libraries support group on the history of the labor movement. No smear, tattering, distraction of the files. As a founding member of the Historical Commission of the PDS, later the left, the Hellen Panke/ Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation and as a member of the Leibniz Sozietät, he continuously took part in important historical and current political debates. Much of what he brought into the debates in the 1990s, be it to the verdict “injustice”, be it to the material and biographical expropriations of East Germans, the humiliations, discrimination, injuries and degradation, which were ignored by all previous federal governments and were long mocked by the West German media and majority society, is more evident than ever today. Can no longer be negated.

Günter Benser, an integrator, more modest and always down to earth, died on Thursday, March 27, at the age of 94. Many will miss him. His book “GDR – intends to be with the Millennium 2000, which is intended with leniency” may be considered his legacy and should find many readers today. A new edition would be desirable.