Horst Bartel


Horst Bartel was a German historian and university professor. He was involved in most of the core historiography projects undertaken in the German Democratic Republic. His work on the nineteenth-century German Labour movement places him firmly in the mainstream tradition of Marxist–Leninist historical interpretation.

Life

Horst Bartel was born in Cottbus. His father worked in :de:Straßenbauer|street construction. By the time Bartel left school, in 1942, war had broken out. He started a :de:Lehrerbildungsanstalt|teacher training course at Orlau in Upper Silesia, but he left the course in 1944 without completing it. In the meantime, in 1943 he joined the Hitler Youth organisation, and during the same year was conscripted for National Labour Service. As Germany's eastern frontier moved west to the accompaniment of industrial scale ethnic cleansing, he appears to have moved west, since in 1945 he was captured not by the Red army but by the Americans who held him as a prisoner of war between May and September 1945, initially at Heilbronn and subsequently at Linz.
Between September 1945 and 1946 Bartel worked as a messenger at a hospital in Cottbus. In April 1946 he was one of many thousands in what had by now become Germany's Soviet occupation zone to join the newly formed Socialist Unity Party of Germany which a few years later would become the ruling party for a new standalone "East German" state. Later the same year he embarked on an :de:Neulehrer|accelerated on-the-job teacher-training course. The course included work as a teacher at a primary school at Peitz, a small town a short distance to the north of Cottbus. In Bartel's case, however, teaching was quickly superseded, still in 1946, by a period of university level study at Berlin's Humboldt University, focusing on history, German studies and pedagogy. His student studies continued until 1949.

Selected publications

Monographs and essays

Horst Bartel was one of an initially small minority of committed communists in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany at the end of the war who not only worked together on constructing historical seminars and institutes, but together transformed the context of historical study so that it might comply with the precepts of the East German ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
, a prolific historian who was also noted as an uncompromising critic of the German Democratic Republic and its one party dictatorship, contended that Bartel, along with like-minded colleagues such as Walter Bartel, Karl Bittel, Rudolf Lindau and Albert Schreiner, lacked necessary academic competence, and that even within party corridors were widely viewed as simple propagandists.

Awards and honours