Aunt Minna from West Germany writes to her relatives in East Germany and concludes the letter: ‘I hope the letter will reach you – I heard there is strict censorship’. After four weeks, the letter comes back with the remark: ‘Could not be delivered because of defamation. There is no censorship here’.Footnote 1
Introduction
When Khrushchev broke with Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in January 1956 new hopes for a truly socialist society revived everywhere in the Eastern Bloc states, including in the young East German Democratic Republic. Regarding the execution of state power, one hope was the end of the regime of open state violence, which East German citizens had witnessed as recently as 1953 when Soviet tanks had crushed the workers’ strike in Berlin. But looking back from today, what followed was a shift towards more subtle measures of executing state force, notably the increasing use of large-scale surveillance methods by the secret police, the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the Stasi). As the ‘shield of the party’, the Stasi was supposed to stop class enemies from acting against the state before the army had to be called in. The more subtly it operated, the more democratic (and benevolent) the state would appear to its people and other states.Footnote 2
A second hope that the Twentieth Party Congress nourished was the idea that socialist societies would come closer to the ideal of being a scientific undertaking – in contrast to the arbitrariness under Stalin or the reign of blind class interests under capitalism. This explains the strong response to the congress from the East German intelligentsia.Footnote 3 Among others, scholars at the Institute for Economics at the Academy of Science, founded in 1953, hoped for more occasions to provide the party with sound reasons for a better economic policy. The very existence of this institute presumed that there was more to economic policy than the will of the party. The Marxist belief in the unity of party, knowledge and economic reality ranked high among the young members of the institute. They were committed to scholarly virtues of honesty, argument and evidence in the name of the party. In particular they had to distinguish scientific socialism from dogmatism, a key term to be historicised in the following.Footnote 4
This second hope was crushed during the so-called revisionism campaign that First Secretary Walter Ulbricht launched against large parts of the intelligentsia in the wake of the Twentieth Party Congress. Dismissing other socialists that were not true to Marx's doctrines, the notion of revisionism had a long party history going back to the First International, the conflict with Eduard Bernstein, Lenin's polemics against the syndicalists of the German Labour movement and Stalin's rejection of Tito.Footnote 5 To ‘revise’ Marx was to question the inevitable, law-like and ‘scientific’ historical course of the Communist Party.Footnote 6 Therefore, the party's claim to scientific socialism required combining two images of the enemy: the revisionist and the dogmatist. Ulbricht managed in the late 1950s to create a campaign against those reformist ideas from within the party, which claimed the intellectual heritage of the Marxist-Leninist tradition but were critical of his bureaucratic state apparatus. This is the context of the dismantling of the Academy's Department for the Economy of the German Democratic Republic, led by the prominent economist Friedrich Behrens, a dismantling that marked the moment when economists, as a profession, withdrew into a regime of self-censorship. This is what the following article reconstructs.Footnote 7
In 1956 Behrens and his assistant Arne Benary wrote a small booklet about the diminishing role of the state in socialism entitled ‘The Economic Theory and Politics of the Transitional Period’. The draft was finished in summer 1956 and the printed booklet was ready to be shipped out in fall 1956.Footnote 8 After the Hungarian uprising that November, however, it was perceived as a threat to Ulbricht's regime. Since there was considerable sympathy for the book's ideas among the members of the Institute of Economics at the East German Academy of Sciences, mere censorship would have undermined the relationship between the ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party, and the institute. Between January and April 1957 the party, with the help of the Stasi, therefore staged what I call a show debate, that is, a public condemnation staged in the form of an academic debate. The term show debate suggests an analogy with the well-known show trials under Stalin. Just as the show trials took the form of adherence to law and legal proceedings, including defence and prosecution, but de facto served political aims, so did the show debate take the form of adherence to scholarly virtues of intellectual honesty and openness to evidence and arguments, but de facto served political aims. Just as show trials were a way of appropriating the legal values of justice in socialism, so was the show debate a way of appropriating the scientific virtue of truthfulness in socialism and, by extension, appropriating the Academy of Science as the old bourgeois bastion of knowledge. Whereas Stalin's show trials featured confessions and executions, the aim of the show debate was to persuade the institute's council of party members at the institute, the party-group (Parteigruppe), to drop their support for Behrens and Benary and publicly announce the dogmatic and revisionist character of the booklet. This would result in Benary being stripped of his higher functions and the end of Benary's academic career. Drawing on previously unused materials from the Stasi archives as well as interviews, this article shows how the ‘show debate’ was organised, researched and staged.
The show debate took place at the bimonthly meeting of the party-group at which the close to fifty party members of the institute discussed relevant political issues.Footnote 9 During these first months of 1957 one or more major representatives of the Central Committee (Zentralkommittee der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands; ZK) were, exceptionally, also present, increasing the political pressure on the group. These representatives included Karl Kampfert and Otto Reinhold, head and vice-head of the CC Department for Science and Propaganda (Abteilung Wissenschaften und Propaganda); Gerhart Ziller, CC economy secretary; and Kurt Hager, CC science secretary and friendly acquaintance of Behrens. The two main Stasi informants at the meetings were ‘contact person’ KP Karl Bichtler, code-name ‘Bischak’, party secretary of the institute, and ‘secret informant’ GI Günther Ulisch, code-name ‘Walter’, assistant of Gunther Kohlmey, the head of the institute.Footnote 10 The two main Stasi officers in charge were Captain Roland Kießling and Lieutenant Klaus Seiß.Footnote 11 After the meetings they met personally with the informants and prepared ‘meeting reports’ (Treffberichte). In addition, Kampfert sent reports on the meetings directly to the CC Secretariat (Sekretariat des Zentralkomitees der SED). The multiple reports largely complement each other.Footnote 12 Although the party-group was the immediate audience of the debate, the entire community of East German economists would later read the published ‘consensus’ to dub the booklet revisionist.
The importance of the marginalisation of Behrens and Benary for the future of East Germany's intelligentsia has long been recognised in the literature, but the nature of the debate has been viewed as a matter of the party imposing itself.Footnote 13 Without taking the Stasi into consideration, a key element of the party's success in the debate is missing: the claim to a scientific foundation of the party's policies, including the claim to represent anti-dogmatism. While the party, and Ulbricht in particular, held political responsibility for conducting the revisionism campaign during the thaw, it was the Stasi who staged the debate in such a way that this political intervention in the academic sphere did not appear as censorship. The Stasi was key for legitimising the party's intrusion into the Academy of Science.Footnote 14 With subtle force, as this article shows in detail, the Stasi managed to establish the belief that dogmatism is that which is actually against the party line, and that free scientific debate is that which practically advances the cause of the party.Footnote 15 This article thus proposes a new interpretation of this well-known episode in the history of the East German intelligentsia that contributes to our understanding of the transformation of political power, persecution and surveillance in state socialism in the shift from Stalinism to post-Stalinism.
To be sure, the state power that was being executed was subtler than that during Stalin's famous Moscow show trials. ‘The revisionism debate was not a Stalinist method’, debate participant Heinz Paragenings reminded the author of this article, a historian born in West Germany, in a personal conversation. But he also added that the consensus that emerged to call Behrens and Benary ‘revisionist’ had in fact been a matter of force.Footnote 16 It took from the end of January until April 1957 to reach this consensus. But first, what was the booklet all about?
The Draft
After Khrushchev's speech became public, the air at the Institute for Economics was thick with hopes for change. Behrens's team, young economists in their early twenties, were enthused about possible changes. They included his assistant from Leipzig, Arne Benary, his assistant at the statistical office, Dieter Mann, Heinz Paragenings and about ten other young scholars.Footnote 17 Their official task was to inquire into the foundation of the new state, that is, the transition from capitalism to socialism, which included the difficult question to what extent state and market categories were needed for state planning that hitherto was run as a rigid bureaucracy of norms. How should production costs enter the plan, and how should the plan account for (changing) demand? In the hope of a renewed debate about such questions, Behrens wrote a programmatic piece deploring the lack of creativity among East German economists titled ‘About the State of Economic Science’.Footnote 18 He linked the dogmatism of his colleagues with the phenomenon of bureaucracy, both bourgeois holdovers:
Dogmatism is a form of bourgeois ideology. . . . Dogmatism occupies the same class-hostile place in our ranks as bureaucracy – both belong together like base and superstructure. For can we imagine the bureaucrat who thinks, that is, who is not a dogmatist? And can we imagine a dogmatist who does not cling to what makes the bureaucrat's life dear and worthwhile: regulations, paragraphs and citations?Footnote 19
And regarding the self-criticism of past mistakes during Stalin's reign, he concluded, in a Kantian fashion, that ‘we, ourselves, have to battle against our past mistakes. If we forget this, then we forget the most important lesson of the Twentieth Party Congress: to think for yourself’.Footnote 20 Behrens sent the text to the party newspaper Neues Deutschland in order to reach a large audience, but it was not to happen. The editors, who in East Germany's early days acted like referees, rejected it for ‘both its tone and content’.Footnote 21 The fate of dogmatism and of the meaning of scientific debate was still to be decided.
In the same free-thinking spirit, Behrens and his assistant Benary finalised the draft of their booklet, getting it ready to print in the summer of 1956. Behrens again took serious issue with the bureaucracy of planning. In the light of apparent problems with the first five-year plan, he and Benary contrasted mere administration with ‘economic governance’ using economic ‘levers’. As Benary argued, economic governance meant that the ‘spontaneous labour force’, which was at the heart of Marx's thought, should be taken into account when defining the domain of ‘conscious planning’. Decentralisation in the form of self-administration could be a means of using ‘economic laws’ under socialism, because only under socialism do prices actually reflect value and thus lead to efficiency and, by extension, growth. By contrast, under capitalism allocation was distorted by capital interests.
These ideas were inspired by the Yugoslav model of workers’ self-governance rather than by planning practices in the Soviet Union. Behrens and Benary had discussed Edvard Kardelj's famous Oslo speech that had informed Tito's reforms.Footnote 22 In May 1956 they travelled to Milan to meet a Yugoslav economist, possibly Kardelj himself. Later in the fall of 1956 Benary travelled to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria with his friend and Kohlmey's assistant, Kurt Zieschang. For Benary, Stalinism was a system rather than a personal cult. Ulbricht, however, played down the question of Stalinism first by reducing Stalinism to a personal cult and then denying that there ever was a personal cult in East Germany.Footnote 23 Like Benary, Behrens demonstrated distance from the party's blind Soviet faith. He inquired about the reparations payments to the Soviet Union that he learned were much higher than had been officially reported. In a mid-November trip that was organised by Benary, Behrens sent his assistant Dieter Mann to see Fritz Baade at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy to retrieve data on the payments.Footnote 24
Critical of Soviet-inspired centralisation, Behrens and Benary's most provocative thesis in the booklet revived Marx's notion of the ‘withering away’ of the state as part of the bourgeois superstructure – an old communist utopia almost forgotten in the future envisioned under Stalin:
The view that the state can do everything, and that every affair, even the most private, has to be managed and controlled by the state, is not socialist, but ‘Prussian’, that is Junker-monopolistic. Socialist, that is, Marxist-Leninist, is the view of the withering away of the state as soon as the socialist relations of production solidify and the capitalist threat becomes ineffective; but this means that the self-government of the working masses by the state must find its complement in the self-government of the economy.Footnote 25
Behrens knew how provocative the booklet potentially was but hoped that it might steer discussions in the right direction: ‘I am aware that my remarks touch upon some dogmas. I am sure that I will be “forgiven” if these remarks provide the impetus for a discussion that brings us closer to solving some of the problems I have indicated’.Footnote 26 Until the fall of 1956 it all seemed to happen just like that. The booklet, ready in print at the publishing house Die Wirtschaft, would reach a large audience. One Stasi informant at the institute reported discussions dating from February and July 1956 about drafts of Benary's chapter. The general attitude was positive and engaged: ‘it was a good manuscript, thus the discussion was vivid’, Kohlmey had concluded.Footnote 27 Indeed, according to a later witness, Johannes Puhlmann, an editor of the publishing house, and Karl Kampfert, who would become the fiercest critic of Benary and Behrens, were at this time in favour of their booklet, believing that it would be in line with the party's direction in the near future.Footnote 28
Things changed when Soviet troops shut off Nagy's democratic-oriented government in Hungary on 4 November. Even if the Hungarian uprising was hardly led by intellectuals, let alone economists, First Secretary Ulbricht clearly feared that the same could happen in the German Democratic Republic. In addition, the so-called Harich group was imprisoned in early November.Footnote 29 Led by Wolfgang Harich, a professor of philosophy at Humboldt University, the group proposed ideas for which the label ‘revisionist’ might actually be appropriate: they proposed free elections, a German path to socialism independent from the Soviet Union, the reunification of a neutral Germany and collaboration with West German social democrats. Thus, at this point Ulbricht changed gears in order to maintain power.Footnote 30
At the same moment in the institute there was a large consensus that democratic change would happen. Still in November, the party-group sent a joint letter to the party leaders.Footnote 31 In the name of the consolidation of power and better communication with the people, they lamented the lack of information – some listened to the forbidden United States sector radio RIAS – and demanded economic policy reforms. But this letter was the beginning of an intervention of the party apparatus jointly with the secret police that would reverse this consensus in a matter of months – the same period during which the show trials against the Harich group took place.
A Necessary Debate about False Theories
The first round of events took place in December 1956 and January 1957 when the party came to terms with the fact that mere censorship would not resolve the issue and that it needed to stage a debate.
It began harmlessly enough. On 13 November Behrens received a letter from the publishing house Die Wirtschaft informing him that they had asked Kampfert from the CC Department for Science and Propaganda if quoting Georg Lukács, a member of the Hungarian Nagy government, was a good idea at this moment.Footnote 32 During the following weeks Kampfert (or maybe Hager or even Ulbricht himself) made up his mind. On 13 December the CC Secretariat accepted Kampfert's proposal that the ‘revisionist’ booklet should not be shipped (it must have been Ulbricht who used this word for the first time). ‘Some of the arguments in the booklet currently present the grave danger of politically disorienting the reader and demobilising the necessary measures to consolidate our state power’, the minutes say.Footnote 33 All dozen members of the CC Secretariat now knew exactly what Ulbricht thought of the booklet. At the same meeting, the CC learned of Behrens's attempt to get the reparations payments data from Kiel. This launched a party trial against him, Mann and Benary.
Behrens and Benary learned about this decision not from the CC but from the publishing house, which sent a letter to the two authors. Some days after the Secretariat's meeting, the party-group of the publishing house had to discuss the party's decision in Kampfert's presence. The group did not unanimously agree to withhold the booklet – Heinz Brandt, engineering editor, wanted to release it. In the same week on 21 December the party-group meeting of the institute discussed the letter from the publishing house.Footnote 34 Behrens and Benary were angry and said that they would neither change the text nor wish to see it published by Die Wirtschaft. They also claimed that the publishing house was asked by the Politburo to write the letter (the decision of 13 December indeed precedes the meeting at the publishing house of 18 December). The institute's party secretary Bichtler objected and asserted that the publishing house had acted on its own. The discussion was heated. After the meeting Bichtler reported to the CC Secretariat that ‘the majority of comrades in the party-group shared strong sentiments against the party apparatus and the “regulation” of scientific work’.Footnote 35 Another Stasi informant pointed to the risk that if the party refused to release the booklet, Behrens and Benary would use that against the state.Footnote 36
Indeed, there was a great deal of confusion regarding proper behaviour among the economists. On 7 January Kampfert informed CC science secretary Hager about the current questions discussed at the institute.
How should the scientist behave if the results of his investigations contradict the views of the party leadership or party decisions? How does a scientist behave when his research results cannot be published due to the political situation? . . . Can there be a scientific debate if the scientist cannot publish his research results? What role and tasks does the party apparatus have in connection with the above questions?Footnote 37
The party leadership clearly saw that the integrity of its relationship with the academy was at risk. The booklet had to be released, but in a different form. And so, on 15 January the Secretariat decided that a revised version of the booklet should be printed in the more specialist journal Wirtschaftswissenschaften but should include counter-statements written by other economists. ‘Since the views contained in the booklet are widely used in academia and other circles’, say the minutes of the CC Secretariat, ‘it is necessary . . . to have a debate about these false theories’.Footnote 38 The debate was necessary not because it was unclear if the theory was true or false, but because those who believed it was true had to be convinced that it was actually false. Behrens and Benary should be beaten at their own game and on their own ground so that the political intervention would appear as the result of a genuine debate and not censorship plain and simple.
For Behrens and Benary, the game that was being played was obvious. They demanded that their text should not be published at all. They wrote to the editors, pointing out that Behrens ‘had no intention to be marked as a revisionist’, but their demand was simply ignored.Footnote 39 A discussion of their booklet was put on the agenda for the following party-group meetings, discussions that were decisive for the party not to lose touch with the community of economists. It was then that the Stasi came into play.
Operation Theory
In January 1957 it appeared that only a minority of the Institute's party-group supported the party's point of view that the booklet was ‘revisionist’. The exceptions were Bichtler and Turley, respectively the secretary and manager (Parteigruppenorganisator) of the party-group. What could the Stasi do in order to turn around the consensus?
Considering that the majority of scholars were upset with the party, it was not clear whom the Stasi should target. Until December Captain Kießling had no real focus in his explorations. ‘At first it was not immediately possible to assess which comrades took a fluctuating attitude only because of their petty-bourgeois attitude and who was damaging for the party’, Kießling wrote, probably in early January.Footnote 40 But on 19 January Kießling and Lieutenant Seiß met with Bichtler, who delivered a first clue. He reported that there were rumours that a second booklet authored by Behrens and Benary, more outspoken in its political implications, had been circulating among Behrens's assistants. He also reported a conversation with Zieschang, Kohlmey's assistant and Benary's friend, who claimed to know of the second text: ‘Zieschang said in a drunken state that Behrens and Benary wanted to wind up (aufrollen) the GDR . When the KP wanted to know more about [what Zieschang knew], he turned silent’.Footnote 41 The second booklet does not appear in any of the archives, but it might have been destroyed by Benary at the first signs of state intervention. ‘If there had been a second text, my dad would have mentioned it at some point sooner or later’, his daughter Hannamaria Loschinski later commented.Footnote 42
This rumour about the existence of a second text allowed the Stasi to single out Benary and cast him in a light that could potentially create division in the institute. ‘The past few weeks have provided evidence that Benary is the spokesman in the party – damaging discussions in the Academy of Sciences, who uses his position and scientific basis to foster party-damaging beliefs’, Kießling wrote.Footnote 43 In contrast to Behrens, who might have been too central to the institute, Benary was the ideal victim, one who could be made a showcase for what happens if one diverges from the party line. By polarising the institute members the Stasi could create division in the debate and thus dissolve the subtlety and continuity of the existing arguments. And what polarises more than confidential personal defamation? Thus the Stasi opened ‘observation operation 37/57’ with the code name ‘Theory’. Its mission, in its own terms, was to acquire information about the ‘true’ beliefs of the institute members and Benary in particular. But what this mission actually meant in the academic context was to develop ad-hominem arguments that should undermine Benary's political credibility, resulting in his dismissal from the institute. Thus, the express aim of Operation Theory was ‘to isolate Comrade Benary and to support the work of the party-group such that Benary, with our help, would be ultimately removed from the institute’.Footnote 44 The Stasi, as police, brought in a logic of reasoning about persons into the academic sphere. The difficult balancing act was, however, that despite this logic, the academic sphere had to maintain its autonomy without appearing dogmatic.
Kießling then rolled out the full Stasi machinery. They looked into Benary's entire past, his private life and his family; they interrogated his former student colleagues in Leipzig and his neighbours, surveilled his apartment, read his letters and recorded his telephone calls. His secretaries were asked to work as informants reporting about telephone calls in the office – but these make for less interesting documents as there was a gap of expertise. They also considered recruiting a ‘slim’ woman to pry information from him; Benary was known to ‘have no firm attitude about the opposite sex’ and so he might reveal his true beliefs to a female informant. But there is no evidence that such a woman was ever recruited. After several weeks of inquiry the Stasi found little evidence in his past that could discredit him, apart from his participation in the so-called nepotistic ‘Brandis circle’, a ‘petit-bourgeois group’ at the school of finance in Brandis that supposedly denied jobs to other comrades.Footnote 45
Clearly that was not enough, and the first meeting of the party-group on 23 January indeed went in Behrens and Benary's favour. Ziller, Kampfert and Reinhold from the CC were present. They openly claimed that the booklet did not merely contain false opinions, but also revisionist conceptions. Behrens, however, defended the booklet, arguing that the CC members had not properly read it, nor were they in a position to judge. He claimed his right to do basic research independent of the current political situation, as the party had asked him to do. He also addressed the nature of scientific debates when he contested that his opponents used the argument of preserving the unity of the party against the possibility of scientific debates. He again opposed the idea of publishing the booklet. After the meeting, Behrens's assistants also discredited the CC members’ scientific judgement, as Ulisch, ‘GI Walter’, reported:
Paragenings stated that the staff of the CC, in particular Comrade Reinhold and Comrade Kampfert . . . were not entitled to discuss scientific questions. They were not scientists and have no publications. Their abilities would not be enough to judge such questions; he thinks their only task in the entire discussion is to defend Comrade Ulbricht's line.Footnote 46
That is where matters stood until a few days later First Secretary Ulbricht intervened.
Not Authority Only
The first turning point in the debate was an intervention from above. At the thirtieth Plenum of the CC at the end of January, in front of the entire East German public, Ulbricht intervened directly in the debate. After announcing a major shift in German–German policy that West Germany first needed to develop before unification, he cited and critiqued Behrens and Benary's still unpublished booklet, along with the Petöfi club in Hungary, Kardelj's ideas in Yugoslavia, and the Harich group – all put in one and the same box of ‘revisionism-feeding imperialist forces’. He thus watered down the meaning of ‘revisionism’ to a mere catchword for party enemies. Ulbricht singled out Benary for being ‘at war with Marxist theory’.Footnote 47 With reference to Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign of pluralist criticism as an engine of progress in socialism, he said: ‘the weed of revisionism is . . . neither a flower nor beautiful, nor a useful plant’.Footnote 48 And he added his version of the crux of all Marxist political epistemology:
For us Marxist-Leninists, the pursuit of objective truth serves to elaborate that political direction, which . . . enhances the power of the workers and peasants, and which strengthens the party's leading role, influence and connection with the masses. Any scientific debate that serves this purpose is valuable and welcome.Footnote 49
Ulbricht dedicated an entire section of his speech to the struggle against dogmatism, which for him meant the struggle against the ‘simple reproduction of dogmas without connection to life and praxis’.Footnote 50 He thus claimed political authority regarding the meaning of scientific debate. The further battle over economic ideas would take place on this very epistemological ground. After Ulbricht's speech it was clear that the result of the debate at the institute would attract the attention of the entire political, academic and also public audience.Footnote 51
The Stasi officers hoped that with Ulbricht's backing they could undermine the consensus at the institute. Some days after the speech, they planned the upcoming meetings of the party-group.
Next week, another party gathering on the booklet will take place. They will discuss the theory of spontaneity and the market mechanism. According to Comrade Morgenstern, this will force Behrens and Benary to take a position regarding freedom of expression. At the same time, this meeting will serve to show the other comrades that the theories are wrong and can lead to dangerous political conclusions. To this end, the existing GI and KP must take an offensive position and, above all, stress the danger of such ideas in order to isolate Behrens and Benary. In the second meeting, which would have to take place in two to three weeks, the GI and KP should openly address the fact of Behrens and Benary being against the party and call for removal from the institute and the initiation of a party trial.Footnote 52
But this was not to happen. Ulbricht's authority was not enough to force consensus. The two meetings of the party-group in February did not settle the debate. At the first meeting on 15 February Hager and Kampfert were present, Behrens had to be at the statistical office and Benary, in response to Ulbricht, gave a long personal statement (Stellungnahme) defending, and blaming, himself. His theory wrongly presumed, he said, that the party wished for fast and fundamental change. He insisted he had made only theoretical mistakes, thus showing loyalty to the party. But when it came to accepting the label of revisionism he candidly expressed his doubts:
It is particularly difficult for me to gain clarity about the question of revisionism. Nobody will expect me to condemn right now as false all my theoretical ideas that I have developed over a long period of time. Above all, nobody will be served if I engage in ‘general self-criticism’, without being really convinced. Some things have become clear to me, some not yet.Footnote 53
Not accepting the label revisionist, Benary's statement had little success. Hager and Kampfert repeated that Behrens and Benary's ideas were not merely theoretical but ideological mistakes. The strategy was clear: if the issue was theoretical, the party would have to allow pluralism of opinion; if it was ideological, it would be possible to use ad-hominem arguments provided by the secret police in order to discredit them politically.
Ulbricht's speech left his mark on the discussion, and some switched sides. Zieschang, who basically repeated Ulbricht's speech, exercised self-criticism for his previous support of Behrens and Benary. Their mistakes, he said, went back before the Twentieth Party Congress; that is, they were not historically contingent, but were more deeply anchored in their personal attitudes. But not everyone felt obliged to change sides. Paragenings said that some aspects of the booklet were wrong while others were right, which made the informant describe his attitude pejoratively as conciliatory (versöhnlerisch) – one of the epistemic vices in East Germany: if one showed an understanding for both sides of a conflict, an attitude that is valued in bourgeois intellectual cultures, one revealed oneself to be shaky in one's attitude and to lack class-consciousness. Also the sluggish work of the party-group, that is, Bichtler, was blamed, who in turn blamed the lack of unity among the party leadership.Footnote 54 In the end most institute members agreed that the text contained mistakes but was not ‘revisionist’. Therefore, Hager concluded, more discussion was necessary.Footnote 55
At the next meeting on 27 February Hager, Kampfert and Reinhold were present, as was Behrens. This time the counter-statements to be published jointly with the two articles of the booklet were discussed, written by Kampfert, Hermann Scheler, Humboldt philosopher for historical materialism, Helmut Richter of the Institute for Social Sciences at the CC and Herbert Luck, an economist from Rostock. Marx's ‘withering away’ of the state, so ran one argument, consisted in a gradual disappearing of the compulsory character of the state rather than of its central economic function. Behrens was enraged. As if the historical meaning of ‘revisionism’ would still matter at this point, he refused the label and explained why his ideas did not question Marx's basic principles. He did not mention the positive role of the state because that was simply not the topic of the booklet. He called the counter-statement written against him a ‘defamation’ and openly said what others must have felt, that ‘at present a campaign is run against him. . . . They try to plant things on him. . . . What happens has nothing to do with a scientific debate’.Footnote 56 This was Behrens's last intervention in the debate, as he did not attend another meeting. He must have believed that everything he said would be turned against him, and so gave up believing in the rules of the game.
Trying to plant things on them was exactly what the Stasi planned for the coming meeting. The decisive testimony that would supplement Ulbricht's authority came from Zieschang, Benary's friend who turned out to be the informer. During February Stasi Officer Kießling set up three meetings to talk things out (Aussprache) that were carried out first by Bichtler and Morgenstern, the party organiser of the institute at the CC, then by Kampfert and officers Kießling and Seiß themselves.Footnote 57 First with hesitance, but then with increasing assertiveness and confidence, Zieschang spread all sorts of half-truths and discrediting private information. He put forth class arguments, arguing that Benary became a party member out of career interests rather than conviction, while describing Behrens as a bourgeois intellectual: ‘Behrens wants to represent his own doctrine, as every bourgeois scientist wants to have a theory associated with his name’.Footnote 58 He said that Behrens had contacts with the enemy such as the West German Social Democrat Viktor Agartz (which would have indeed shown a revisionist attitude). He testified that Benary, in a drunken state at a garden party after a sailing trip, spoke of the Polish intervention as ‘red fascism’. He claimed ‘Behrens said that the time of changes in the GDR had been missed. One should better bury it and rebuild socialism from anew’.Footnote 59 And yet he assured the Stasi that Behrens was less radical than Benary. Regarding the second booklet, Zieschang presented details of its actual contents: Behrens and Benary claimed that workers in East Germany were exploited and should be considered as state wage labour just like workers in capitalism. But the most critical piece of information was the following:
Some weeks ago Zieschang walked into Benary's room; [another comrade] was also present, who had several pages in his hand and behaved very secretively. Zieschang, who wanted to read them, did not get them, so he tore them from [this] comrade. However, they were immediately taken away by Benary, who pocketed them. Zieschang said he had recognised, because of the lettering and a few sentences he could read, some sort of programme that entails slogans such as ‘freedom of expression, freedom of the press’ and the like.Footnote 60
These were the slogans of the Harich group. In later meetings Benary would deny that this had happened. Paragenings recalled in a personal conversation that the programme did in fact exist. But if the programme had really existed, recalled Benary's former wife, also a trained economist, they would have discussed it at home.Footnote 61 If discussed at home, however, Benary might also have expressed the wish to keep it confidential. Whether or not it really existed, the second booklet soon began to exist as a matter of fact within the debate (and Paragenings might have remembered this fact rather than the programme itself). In any event, he and many at the institute did not agree with these claims made in ‘the programme’. As Marxists-Leninists, everyone thought that democratisation had to come from below, from economic reform, and not from above, from political reform. The Stasi knew of this disagreement well and now hoped to finally break through the stubborn sympathies for Behrens and Benary.
Events outside the institute also played in favour of the Stasi. On 9 March a verdict was reached about Harich: guilty, with a punishment of ten years in prison. Steinberger, for a short time the assistant of Behrens, was also put in jail.Footnote 62 Benary now understood what was at stake and also the risk that Zieschang represented to him. As Kießling reported, Benary ‘recently called Comrade Zieschang by telephone and begged him to keep quiet about the conversations they had. As Comrade Zieschang pointed out that all things had to be clarified by the party, Benary retreated noticeably’.Footnote 63 At home Benary dealt with his one-month-old second child, adding to the fatigue caused by the discussions. The pressure left its mark. He got sick and left for his father's town. His wife began seriously worrying: ‘I hoped they would not arrest him’, she recalled:
After the thirtieth plenum, the situation turned severe. He once came home, dropped into the chair, still wearing his hat and coat. ‘Can you imagine what a crazy day I had today?’ . . . To get home, he first drove to S-Bahn Friedrichstraße before taking the train to Niederschöneweide. The S-Bahn was still running normally in West Berlin as there was not yet the wall. At the first stop, it flashed in his head: ‘If I now, here, get off, all the trouble is over!’ I was shocked, and I realised what pressure he was under. But he did not get off.Footnote 64
The Showdown
The showdown was planned for 13 March. All the information acquired by the Stasi, in particular from Zieschang's testimony, was revealed. Two meetings were scheduled, both dedicated solely to Benary: a department head meeting followed by a party-group meeting. When Zieschang repeated his testimony in the first meeting, Benary was stunned, as GI ‘Elli’ reported:
Comrade Zieschang has talked about many of the details he knew through his close personal connection to Benary from the past. Obviously, Benary had not expected that and was very scared and became increasingly insecure. During the break, he said: ‘now you get to know people’. That referred to Comrade Zieschang. . . . After the meeting, Benary was extremely nervous and insecure. For the first time we have managed to unsettle his arrogant position.Footnote 65
As if in court, Behrens's other assistants were also called into the room and were asked separately about Benary's programme. As had Benary himself, they denied its existence. Bichtler reported that he believed that Benary and the other assistants coordinated their statements beforehand. Indeed, the telephone calls of Benary and other assistants were reported in which it became clear that they prepared for the party-group meeting.Footnote 66 But their discussion was theoretical, and they did not mention a ‘programme’. At the end of the department head meeting it was decided that Benary would be dismissed as vice-director of Behrens's department. But the more important party-group meeting was to follow.
At this meeting, party secretary Bichtler, rather than Zieschang, presented the evidence acquired by the secret police. However, nobody really reacted to it. It all seemed so constructed. Paragenings felt offended: ‘he (Paragenings) refuses constructing artificially (political) factions’.Footnote 67 Mann referred to the general confusion in the institute after the Twentieth Party Congress. And Johann Lorentz Schmidt, former head of the history of economic doctrines group, said that it was wrong to judge comrades only one-sidedly. Bichtler proposed that Benary be removed from the institute, but to no avail, as a consensus had not been achieved:
At the end of the speech, the KP [Bichtler] demanded that Benary be removed from the institute. The discussions in the group meeting, however, had no success. . . . Most of the comrades said nothing about it, some said that what the party leadership says is of course very bad, but one should check this all first. Not a single comrade said anything about the KP's demand to remove Benary from the institute. It was agreed to hold another group meeting next week and continue the discussion.Footnote 68
In his further report, KP Bichtler asked the Stasi officers for more evidence to discredit Benary but there was nothing more to deliver. One option was left: In the final meeting on 26 March, as Paragenings recalled, there were two officers keeping records in addition to the members of the Politburo. Their identity was not revealed but everyone knew that it must have been the Stasi. Most likely it had been the two officers Kießling and Seiß themselves. Paragenings always felt free to say what he thought. But then no more, he recalled.Footnote 69
Kampfert opened the meeting by increasing pressure: the CC expected the institute's position in writing by the next day. He, instead of Bichtler, proposed the resolution to declare the booklet ‘revisionist’. Everyone understood that, as the Stasi planned, ‘the aim of the meeting was to force everyone to take a position’.Footnote 70 Party loyalty seemed to leave no choice, and yet, some did not speak out, and some were still against the resolution, which shows how profound was the trust in the party's appreciation of truthfulness. Nevertheless nobody voted against the resolution. Ulisch ‘GI Walter’ added, as if the Stasi would not know, that those from Behrens's group had only agreed on the resolution because they saw no other way out for themselves.Footnote 71 The resolution was presented, it says, as the result of a ‘thorough, severe, and serious discussion’.Footnote 72 It declared Behrens and Benary's booklet revisionist because of the opposition of administration and economic method, and a general disregard for the leading role of the party. But, moreover, it stated that Behrens and Benary behaved in an unscholarly manner; in other words, in an astonishing and duplicitous feat of reasoning, the party's claim to the scholarly virtues that make for a scientific debate was maintained.
Just as we reject the content of the work, so do we reject the method. . . . Both comrades had to be aware of the nature of their views, for example, although Comrade Benary knew there were others in the Institute who did not share his views . . . a general discussion of their views was bypassed. Such a method is all the more strange because both comrades repeatedly and urgently demanded the development of scientific debate and they had to be clear that such fundamental issues would first have to be discussed at the Institute.Footnote 73
Everyone knew that this resolution would mean Benary's removal from the institute and the end of his academic career. He was to be sent into industry. The resolution was instantly published in the third edition of Wirtschaftswissenschaft. The Stasi had attained its goal.
In May the party-group of the institute sent another statement to the CC secretariat, not published, in which they explained why they initially supported the ideas of Behrens and Benary. They blamed a ‘petty-bourgeois atmosphere’ that fostered an ‘individualist work ethos’. Behrens's notions of self-governance were too ‘theoretical’ and too far from practice, and the mistake was that they were not thoroughly discussed, and thus were treated dogmatically. Dogmatism, ‘being alien to life’, and ‘fetishism’ were all equated with that which is not in the line of the party. Thus, the Marxist commitment to practical relevance was mobilised against anything beyond the status quo.
It is imperative that the party-groups watch over an open, factual, undogmatic and comradely atmosphere that includes, however, ruthlessness against deviations from Marxism-Leninism. Petty-bourgeois sensitivities must be persistently fought. We must convince ourselves that we can only live up to our political-ideological obligations if all important issues are discussed to the end.Footnote 74
A scientific debate, therefore, was that which furthered the cause of the party. The link between dogmatism and revisionism, and thus the party-knowledge nexus, had been forged.
After the Debate is Before the Debate
In the spring of 1957 the texts of the booklet were published in Wirtschaftswissenschaft jointly with the counter-statements.Footnote 75 The ‘debate’ and its resulting ‘consensus’ were made public. But this was only the beginning of the rituals against revisionism. For Behrens, what followed was a series of repeated self-incriminating ‘position statements’ (Stellungnahmen) that were supposed to show that he himself admitted his errors and changed his mind in the course of the ‘debate’. The first was written in June 1957 as a letter to the Politburo, which decided to publish it in Wirtschaftswissenschaft.Footnote 76 He referred back to the counter-statements mentioned above, but still pointed to the contradictions between the economic base and the state superstructure in East Germany that hindered economic growth. Hypocrisy, for Behrens, would mean giving up his deep trust in a socialist society, which he never did. Thus, his statement was published again, jointly with other articles showing that his amendments to his original ideas were not sufficient. One of them was written by the two direct allies of the Stasi, Karl Bichtler and Kurt Zieschang.Footnote 77 The pattern was clear: suspicion against Behrens was operational in keeping up ‘revisionism’ as a watchword against internal party-critiques.
And so for the entire community of political economists, a genre of writings against revisionism emerged in the wake of the events described in this article. Debunking revisionism became part of the plan for economic research and a standard lesson in the basic studies of the social sciences (Grundstudium) taught for every discipline at all universities. The atmosphere at the institute became dull and intellectual enthusiasm vanished behind a veil of self-censorship.Footnote 78 Serve your time, be careful and keep going was the new professional ethos of East German economists. The political economy of socialism was browbeaten, mediocre and reduced to commentary on party decisions.
The official party penalty for Behrens came in July 1957 for his acquisition of the reparations payment data from Baade in Kiel. He and Benary received a ‘rebuke’ (Rüge) and Dieter Mann a ‘warning’ because all three ‘lacked vigilance . . . that Baade used [these statistics] for campaigning against the Soviet Union’, the verdict said.Footnote 79 Only then was it officially decided that Behrens had to be removed as director of the statistical office, and that ‘because of the bad influence that the comrade exerted on the younger scientific staff of the Institute for Economics, he can no longer remain deputy head of this institute’.Footnote 80 The change in his career was thus presented as not being the result of his ‘revisionist’ position. Behrens would remain at the academy, first in the group on the history of economic doctrines, then as the head of a small group on labour productivity.
But Behrens and Benary were not the only ones who had to change careers in the wake of the events. Paragenings stayed for one more year and then was likewise sent into industry.Footnote 81 Dieter Mann remained for two more years and then left for West Germany. Ulbricht also asked Kohlmey personally to publish a statement regarding his responsibility for the events at the institute.Footnote 82 Fred Oelßner then replaced him as director of the institute. A curious choice, since Oelßner had lost all his CC functions as a consequence of the dismissal of other political victims of the revisionism campaign, notably Politburo member Karl Schirdewan.Footnote 83 The academy's institute thus became the ‘parking lot’ for those diverging from the party line. Bichtler, instead, was awarded 150 DM from the Stasi for his successful collaboration, and was soon promoted to party secretary of the entire Academy of Sciences and later director of the institute.Footnote 84 Ulisch was awarded 100 DM, and left the institute in 1962 to continue his career at the Stasi.Footnote 85
Though the careers of the actors were under control, Behrens and Benary's ideas reappeared later. Once the revisionism campaign calmed down after the expulsion of Schirdewan in 1958, and once the brain-drain to the West was stopped by the ‘anti-capitalist rampart’ in 1961, Ulbricht announced in 1963 the so-called New Economic Policy of Planning and Government. Though there was no mention of the diminishing role of the state or self-governance, the reform introduced market categories of profit and decentralisation very much in line with the ideas of Behrens and Benary. Wolfgang Berger, Helmut Koziolek and Otto Reinhold were at the origin of Ulbricht's new policy – all scholars who knew Behrens's work very well.Footnote 86 In other words, the current needs of the state apparatus overshadowed scientific ideas to the extent that what was considered unacceptable in the wake of the Hungary uprising could become acceptable later when the storms calmed down.
What happened to Behrens and Benary after these months of defamation? With fewer responsibilities and fewer obligations to participate in the institute's meetings, Behrens had more time to write, but turned towards less contested fields such as the history of economic thought and empirical studies on labour productivity. But all his activities were under the continuous surveillance of the party apparatus and the Stasi. He was often denied travel to international conferences and he struggled with long refereeing processes, unqualified referees and slow publication processes.Footnote 87 He felt blackballed, as he complained in a letter to Hager in 1961: ‘such treatment is not only daunting, it is also unworthy and harmful, and I cannot believe that this is in the interest of the party’.Footnote 88 In 1959 Günther Mittag suggested that Behrens should be sent into industry, a suggestion that was even supported by the institute's party-group. But this did not happen.Footnote 89
As so often in socialist regimes, Behrens's family also suffered from the affair. His daughter studied economics at Humboldt University during the reign of the hardliner Robert Naumann. Though she knew little of the debate involving her father she was called to the party-group of the students to distance herself from her father's views. The partner of his other daughter, Christin, when becoming a candidate of the party, was advised to end the relationship.Footnote 90 Behrens's wife suffered more severe consequences. She was mayor of Zeuthen, a small town outside of Berlin where the family lived, and was asked to resign from her post.Footnote 91
Behrens continued to operate on the margins of the party line by critiquing bureaucracy and centralism. In a private meeting with Ernst Bloch, he said, according to a Stasi report: ‘in reality, I'm a deeper revisionist than they know!’Footnote 92 In September 1967 at the occasion of a conference on 100 years of Marx's Capital in Frankfurt, West Germany, Behrens delivered a different version of a speech that had been agreed with the institute. Another lengthy discussion at the institute and party expulsion awaited him; thus he chose to retire.Footnote 93 He continued to analyse the East German state but without publishing his thoughts. He criticised the German Democratic Republic as a continuation of a bourgeois order in which the state became a class of its own. He thought of the East German state as a form of monopoly fostering hypocrisy and a lack of integrity among state functionaries who form their own class interests against the working class.Footnote 94 Though he soon became known in the West as a ‘progressive’ revisionist, he never wished to leave East Germany.Footnote 95
As for Benary, the Stasi mistakenly worried that he would leave the country.Footnote 96 Instead, he fully embraced his new position at a cable plant (VEB Kabelwerk Oberspree). There, he could breathe fresh air, his wife recalled:
That was the best thing that could have happened to him. . . . When he came home from the cable plant on his first day, on 1 August, 1957 – I remember that very well – he said: ‘You know, I think that's the right place for me’. When he introduced himself to the new party-group the comrades said: ‘We do not at all care about the affair at your institute, and your party's punishment! Now you belong to us, and you have to fully commit yourself to solving our problems’. What a reception! That encouraged him.Footnote 97
Kampfert, however, did not give up mistrusting Benary. In 1959 he asked Benary to write a statement admitting his revisionist position back in 1956 to be presented at the party-group meeting, and to be published jointly with Behrens's statement mentioned above.Footnote 98 It is unclear with what kind of emotions he felt as he wrote this statement (in humiliation, in indifference, with irony or in honest conviction), but at this point Benary appeared to care less about intellectual honesty and simply went along with what the party wished him to do. In a personal letter to Behrens – they remained good friends – he wrote on 14 November 1959:
Thursday was the planned conversation with Kampfert. It took an hour and was very friendly. My job assessment was quite good . . . and my wish to stay in the plant for the time being was met. However, I cannot get out of making a last statement. It would be necessary and time to finally draw a line. . . . It's not about a theoretical statement, but about a political one – well, so be it!Footnote 99
His statement reads in fact like a bow to the party. Yes, his text from 1956 was revisionist, and yes, he could have become ‘a mouthpiece for irresolute elements inside and outside the party’.Footnote 100 However, for Kampfert, the struggle against Benary appeared to become a life mission. On 21 January 1960 he returned again to the party-group of the plant for another occasion to talk things over.Footnote 101 Benary's statement was still not sufficient, and he explained to the party-group that Benary was still not yet fully honest. He argued that Benary had developed his own ‘factionist’ conception against the party.
Nevertheless, Benary had an impressive career, rising from a worker in the organisation department to become the economic director of the plant. Paragenings met him once during these years on a professional occasion. In contrast to his wife, Paragenings had the notion that Benary wanted to come back to academia. But whatever his future plans, they were not to be. On 10 October, 1971 at the age of forty-two, Benary committed suicide.Footnote 102 According to the criminal investigations and according to his wife, the circumstances were unrelated to his professional career – but they left that impression, as Paragenings speculated in a personal conversation.Footnote 103
When we think of these personal destinies, we easily see them as dupes, if not victims. But the actors’ perspectives might have been very different. Though their career paths changed, they had not been imprisoned or in physical or economic danger. They indeed continued believing in a bright socialist future. Paragenings, looking back, explained away the behaviour of the party apparatus by the early state of socialism when remnants of bourgeois state force remained necessary.Footnote 104 The belief remained that the party would in the end be open to the truth. And this belief was nourished by a strong conviction shared by the first generation of the German Democratic Republic: that socialism was the only alternative to the totalitarian regime of fascism. The memories of the Second World War made them both believe that there would never again be victims of the state and simply accept as normal that there were in fact victims of the state.
Conclusion
The revisionism debate was not only a debate about economic policy. It was also a debate about the intellectual ethos of the socialist economist, about the relationship between scholarship and party loyalty and about the very nature of a scientific debate. While the rejection of the ideas about economic policy, as we have seen, was contingent on the historical situation of the thaw, the lasting effect for the remainder of the East German state was that the party could continue to claim the epistemic values of a scientific debate despite their obvious oppression.
What is obvious to us, having access to more archival sources, might not have been obvious back then. Thinking of the perspective of the actors, the show debate would have been an utter failure if all had understood its show character. For those who did not, Behrens and Benary's notion of decentralisation was indeed revisionist, and their party loyalty made them trust in the scientific organisation of the state apparatus. As demanded by the party until the end, this larger audience of political economists continued putting major intellectual efforts into reform proposals, proposals that were neutralised by a large bureaucratic apparatus.Footnote 105 But we should also point to those who did understand the show character of the debate and considered it an appropriate measure of the party against class enemies. For them, the party-knowledge nexus boiled down to mere faith in the law-like future development of socialism, that is, boiled down to a point where knowledge and ideology fused. Being an intellectual, for them, became mainly a matter of personal devotion – a devotion, for which the Stasi, rather than the Academy of Science, was the ultimate judge.
But then there were also many people who did understand the show character of the debate, did not give up their basic socialist beliefs, and began living in an inner exile. For them, the show debate was in fact political deterrence establishing a regime of self-censorship. It is for them that the dismantling of the Academy's institute in 1957, and post-Stalinism at large, was a missed opportunity for a better German Democratic Republic. Many of them might have agreed with what Behrens's daughter said when summarising the lesson of the revisionism debate: ‘never wear your heart on your sleeve!’Footnote 106
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Gisela Eckstein (formerly Benary), Hannamaria Loschinski (née Behrens) and Heinz Paragenings for sharing their memories. I am grateful for comments by Erwin Dekker, Yakov Feygin, Günther Krause, Thomas Kuczyinski, Robert Leonard, Jean-Guy Prévost, Thomas Stapleford, André Steiner, Hans-Jürgen Wagener and two anonymous referees. I thank Kaja Rupieper and Iris Winkler for their archival help. This research has been funded by the Insight Development Grant of the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, SSRHC (file number 430-2017-00439), and by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung ‘Modernisierungsblockaden in Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft der DDR’. For ethics approval, please refer to project 2097e2017 of the comité institutionnelle d'éthique de la recherche avec des êtres humains at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
