Wolfgang Schröder (9 July 1935 - 18 November 2010) was a German historian. The early decades of his professional career were spent as a member of the East German historical establishment: the focus of much of his work was on the history of the labour movement. He nevertheless remained professionally active and made further important contributions through his published work and teaching during the years after reunification.^[1][2][3]

Life

Wolfgang Schröder was born in Dresden just over two years after the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and just under ten years before the central portion of the city was destroyed during the final months of the Second World War.

He passed his school final exams (Abitur) in 1953, which opened the way to university-level education. He studied History at the Karl Marx University (as it had recently been renamed) in Leipzig between 1953 and 1957. That year he passed the state exams entitling him to work as a secondary school teacher, and for a year he worked as a secondary school teacher.

In 1958 he became a research assistant at the "1871–1917 department" at the Leipzig branch of the Institute for History of the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He received his doctorate in July 1963, supervised by Ernst Engelberg and Lothar Mosler. His subject was the German Trades Union movement in the 1890s. A peculiar feature of the East German university system - taking a lead from the Soviet system - was the Promotion B (loosely "Doctorate B"), which in terms of building an academic career (though not, protagonists insist, in other respects) took the place of a Habilitation qualification. Schröder received his Promotion B in 1972 for work on the Labour Movement in the final third of the nineteenth century.

Between 1969 and 1990 he was employed as editor responsible for the "Jahrbuch für Geschichte" ([East German] History Yearbook). From 1973 he was also a member of its editorial college. In 1976 he relocated from Leipzig to East Berlin when he switched to working as a researcher at the Central/National Historical Institute at the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It was here, in 1986, that he received the title of "professor".

Following the changes of 1989/1990, from 1992 till 1996 Schröder worked as an assistant at the Bonn based Commission for the history of parliamentarianism and political parties [in Germany].^[4]

Schröder's main research area was the history of the later nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the German labour movement. He published an article on Ernestine Liebknecht (1989) and an essay on Nathalie Liebknecht (1990)

After publishing a book on Ernestine Liebknecht (1897, 2nd ed., 1989) and an essay on Nathalie Liebknecht (1990),^[1] his crowning academic achievement was to have been his biography of Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900), a pioneer of the SPD, and the father of Karl Liebknecht (1871 - 1919). Unfortunately, when Wolfgang Schröder died at Taucha (near Leipzig) in 2010,^[3] the biography remained unfinished. However, the project was well progressed, and three years later his widow, Renate Dreßler-Schröder and the historian Klaus Kinner were able to publish a version of it in 2013 as part of Schröder's literary legacy. No attempt was made to gloss over the fragmentary nature of the work, but it nevertheless contained a large amount of new research involving hitherto overlooked sources.^[3]

Output (selection)

References