Manfred Weißbecker – Cardinal questions of fascism

The global economic crisis of the early 1930s brought the fragile building of the Weimar Republic to collapse. It arose from the irrationality of class society, its goods and monetary fetishism, such as the lack of social control over production. In Germany, she washed the most important movement that the Republic wanted to do not want to start the second grip for world power.

The strength of the Republic, including the Social Democrats, closed the eyes before the writing on the wall, before the slogan “Germany awakening, Juda die”. Hitler and his Nazis would come and go again. The conservatives and their supports, the large industry and the junkerum, saw with some discomfort on the plebeian dirt, which the growing mass attachment of the National Socialists, as they called themselves. However, they could hardly hide their satisfaction with the appearance of a movement that promised to smash all organizations of the labor movement and to revise the results of the World War. The Communists saw the so -called “social fascists”, the enemy, which was first to be beaten before you could clean up with the Nazis.

These are these cardinal issues and their world -historical consequences that shaped and shape the research work by the Jena historian Manfred Weißbecker. Remarkable continuity of thinking and writing caught the eye about the upheavals of 1989 and 1990.

In almost twenty books and several hundred essays, Manfred Weißbecker has turned to the history of the Weimar Republic and especially its failure, the reasons for the success of the NSDAP, its “leader”, its supporters and the class base of German fascism. In view of the rise of the AfD in Thuringia, its regional-historical studies on the first “model country” of fascism with the government participation of the Hitler party are of the highest topicality.

Manfred Weißbeck is concerned with social and mentality-historical questions, but always about the ominous effects of fascist players. Of all this witnesses the history of the NSDAP, which was also very well received internationally, together with his friend and Berlin colleague Kurt Pätzold (1930–2016), as well as the biographies again written by both of Hitler and Rudolf Hess as well as their own detailed studies on Fritz Sauckel, the fascist Reichslapfhalter in Thuringia and general representative for the work assignment, who was responsible for the death of thousand forced laborers.

Weißbecker’s work is every deterministic understanding of history, illuminating the complicated network of relationships between leaders and guided and, as he wrote, “that the authoritarian-fascist form of rule with its extreme centralization of power, with the terrorist discipline of the masses, with the” leader -Cult ‹and the popular community demagogy requires a different, more effective and at the same time more authoritarian leadership type than the bourgeois-parliamentary form of rule«; A leadership type, which is exhausted by imperialist politics internally and outwards and yet far more than a mere instrument of large capital.

Manfred Weißbecker tried to achieve such findings in research and teaching before 1989. His immediate reaction to the elimination of the GDR by the rebellious masses of people was his “thoughts on the loss of anti-fascism”. Anti -fascism in the GDR was Janus -headed: it was a humanistic mandate and at the same time the litigation of authoritarian, anti -freedom -anti -freedom practice – in the end only a “shift”, says Weißbecker to the latter. This then made it easier for those who want to eliminate the legitimate anti -fascism with the legitimatorial. They were also found under the “handling” of the East University.

The professor lost his work at the university in 1992. This did not stop him from continuing to work. As chairman of the Thuringian Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation and as the organizer of numerous symposia, he was and remained active for Jena University History. In addition, readers of this newspaper appreciate his profound contributions to contemporary history. Now he will be ninety on the calendar on February 8th. Seriously, Manfred? It is difficult to believe this. But if so: Congratulations, Ad Multos Annos!