16 Facts About Ernst Engelberg

Ernst Engelberg was a German university professor and Marxist historian.

Ernst Engelberg made a particularly noteworthy contribution with his two-volume biography of Otto von Bismarck which in the view of at least one commentator represented a paradigm shift for historiography in the German Democratic Republic.

Ernst Engelberg was born into a family with well documented democratic revolutionary credentials.

Ernst Engelberg's father, Wilhelm Engelberg, was a publisher and a left-wing activist, who in 1898 had founded the local Social Democratic Party association in Haslach.

The family was politically aware, and even as an old man Wilhelm Engelberg delighted to proclaim himself a "democrat of 1848".

Ernst Engelberg's turned out to be one of very few doctorates awarded for a Marxist dissertation under the Third Reich.

Ernst Engelberg faced trial, with others, on 17 October 1934 and was sentenced to an eighteen-month term, which he spent in the prison at Luckau.

Ernst Engelberg later told his son that he had considered himself lucky: if the Nazis had known that Engelberg was the Communist Party student leader identified with the cover name "Alfred", his sentence would have been spent not in a prison but in a concentration camp.

Ernst Engelberg had contacts with the Movement for a Free Germany.

Ernst Engelberg tried without success to obtain permission to emigrate to the United States or Cuba.

The part of Germany to which he returned was in 1948 still administered as the Soviet occupation zone, which later, in October 1949, was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic, a new Soviet sponsored German state which was administratively configured according to Soviet precepts, and in which for the next forty years, Ernst Engelberg pursued a successful academic career.

Between 1960 and 1980 Ernst Engelberg served as President of the National Committee of East German Historians.

Ernst Engelberg nevertheless lived on for more than another two decades, spending his final years living in Berlin with his second wife, Waltraut.

The list of Ernst Engelberg's publications is a long one.

Ernst Engelberg was impressed by Bismarck's political realism, his intellectual insights and imagination, the care with which he calibrated his foreign policy, and his willingness to recognise the emergence of the new age.

In October 1989 Ernst Engelberg became the last recipient of the Outstanding People's Scholar.