Wolfgang Abendroth, who died 40 years ago today, was one of West Germany’s most prominent post-war opposition figures and a pioneer of the 1968 movement. His radically democratic interpretation of Germany’s Basic Law, according to which a socialist transformation of capitalism was constitutionally possible, was groundbreaking for the defence of the right to strike and the struggle against the Emergency Acts. In light of the recent dramatic erosion of fundamental constitutional rights, his writing remains quite relevant today.
Gregor Kritidis is a historian and works as the managing director of the Lower Saxony Friends of Nature. He has written extensively on the socialist opposition in post-war West Germany.
Wolfgang Abendroth was born in Wuppertal in 1906 and was socialized not only in the socialist workers’ movement, but also in the youth movement. He grew up in Frankfurt in a family of teachers and joined the socialist movement there at a young age. Although he was more interested in biology, Abendroth began studying law in 1924, reasoning that lawyers could better serve the workers’ movement. He became politically active in organizations like the International Red Aid, which supported incarcerated Communists, giving him the opportunity to try out his specialized skills in practice. For Abendroth, the League of Free Socialist Youth, rooted in both the proletarian and middle-class youth movements, became one of his most important fields of political action.
While at law school, he became part of the milieu around Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, the centre of discourse among various non-dogmatic Marxist schools of thought in the German-speaking world. Politically, he was oriented toward the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) or KPO, whose united front policy sought to organize on the basis of class interests rather than along party lines.
Abendroth wrote a dissertation on the Works Councils Act of 1920 supervised by socialist labour-law expert Hugo Sinzheimer, but was unable to finish it: in 1933, he was briefly arrested along with his dissertation adviser and dismissed from the legal teaching service. With the victory of the Nazi movement, his academic career came to an end. His second dissertation on the social and political rights of people in the colonial territories, earning him his doctorate in Bern in 1936, was seized shortly after its publication in Breslau. His conception of international law was diametrically opposed to the principle of ethnic groups, which amounted to legitimizing imperial warfare.
In February 1937, Abendroth was arrested during a raid on the KPO. That same year, he was given a four-year prison sentence for high treason. The Gestapo tortured him repeatedly while in custody, and at one point he even attempted suicide.
Abendroth’s vision was for an independent, unified, democratic-socialist Germany.
After completing his sentence in Luckau, Abendroth was conscripted into the 999th Penal Division, because even “criminals unworthy of bearing arms” were considered fit for active service after Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad. On the island of Limnos, he made contact with the Greek National Liberation Front (ELAS) and became a close collaborator. When a fall left him badly injured and the military hospital doctor failed to treat him adequately, ELAS dispatched a doctor who would save his life in an emergency operation.
As German troops were withdrawing in 1944, the German resistance group was able to prevent the demolition of an electrical plant. Abendroth deserted by hiding in a cave with Austrian comrade Willy Wehofer. After eight days, ELAS brought them both to the nearby island of Lesvos, where they wrote leaflets addressed to German soldiers.
In order to be able to return to Germany as quickly as possible, Abendroth surrendered to the British Army. He was interned first in Egypt, then in Wilton Park, Britain. It was there that he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1946 and debated the possibilities for democratic socialism with Richard Löwenthal against the backdrop of the Labour Party’s electoral victory. Abendroth was also involved in the discussions leading up to the most significant statement of the left-socialist agenda in the immediate post-war period, namely Löwenthal’s book Jenseits des Kapitalismus (Beyond Capitalism), published under the pseudonym Paul Sering.
After returning to Germany in 1946, Abendroth married his fiancée Lisa Hörnmeyer. She became his most important discussion partner and frequently participated in meetings, given that many of them took place at their home. Because Abendroth had to make up his second state examination and wanted to receive his qualification as a professor, he went to the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ) on the advice of Justice Minister and future Minister-President of the State of Hesse Georg August Zinn. Once there, he carved out a career in Leipzig and Jena as a professor of public law. When a courier from the SPD’s eastern office was arrested in December 1948, Lisa and Wolfgang Abendroth felt compelled to flee the SBZ with their one-year-old daughter.
In 1948, Abendroth became the founding headmaster of the new Reformhochschule für Arbeit und Wirtschaft (Reform College for Labour and Economy) in Wilhelmshaven. Yet this reform project was sabotaged by conservative networks, and he was forced to accept a position as a political scientist at the University of Marburg, where the Hesse SPD hoped to form a counterweight to the right-wing tenured professors. On top of that, the SPD appointed him to the state constitutional courts of Bremen and Hesse.
Another Germany Was Possible
Abendroth’s goal was to create a new intellectual hub for the labour movement with the intention of consolidating scholarly debates, similar to what Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research had done during the Weimar Republic, and developing a strong theoretical and political presence. While the re-established institute in Frankfurt was an important ally, he felt it had lost its function as a think tank for the labour movement.
Abendroth’s vision was for an independent, unified, democratic-socialist Germany — a position that placed him well within the social-democratic mainstream. According to his analysis, Germany’s Basic Law of 1948 was based on a fragile class compromise. Given that capitalist interest groups would challenge it in the event of a renewed crisis, he believed that the important thing was to defend fundamental social and political rights, fight back against anticipated attacks on the constitutional order, and expand the principle of democracy from the state level to the economic sphere.
“Parliament”, he wrote in 1954, “is only a tool for democratic integration to the extent that it remains known that it is merely the coordination centre and decision-making body for the intrinsically democratically organized and varied forces in a modern society”. He argued that the provisions of the Basic Law, according to which the Federal Republic of Germany was a social and democratic constitutional state, created a pathway for additional social structuring up to socialist transformation. Consequently, he wrote in 1956, “such a broad expansion of popular education and knowledge of the masses concerning the problems of their society would make it possible that any distinctions determined by groups or training pathways justifying hierarchical differentiations will tend to become superficial”.
However, Abendroth thought that this reconfiguration would not be led by the SPD so much as by the unions. He maintained particularly close relations with IG Metall (IGM), which counted many former resistance members among its officials. Union members in particular sought his advice where legal questions were concerned, such as in the fight for the Works Constitution Act (Betriebsverfassungsgesetz) and the right to strike. In the debates around rearmament in 1954–55, nuclear weapons for the West German military in 1958, and the conflict over the Emergency Acts, which continued into the late 1960s, IG Metall was both the object of Abendroth’s interventions and his most crucial ally. In 1959, he urged Hans Matthöfer to return from the US and rejoin IGM, writing:
The pool of younger economists who have the knowledge necessary for that kind of work is infinitesimally small thanks to the present state of the economics departments in West Germany. In general, a person can only attain the requisite methodical qualifications in Germany in spite of the university system, not through it. In IG Metall’s economics department, the positions of the formal leaders that have nearly been brought into line [gleichgeschaltet] on questions like these are now threatening a conformist restructuring of everything if you don’t come back.
By contrast, Abendroth’s connection with the SPD grew progressively weaker in the 1950s as the scope of acceptable speech grew narrower and narrower in the anti-communist hothouse of West Germany — a trend also bolstered by the country’s Social Democratic Party. At times, the left-wing Protestant magazine Stimme der Gemeinde along with the left-socialist papers Funken and Sozialistische Politik became Abendroth’s most important publishing outlets. When the Socialist German Students’ League (SDS) was expelled from the SPD in 1961 over its divergent positions, Abendroth became one of the founders of the SDS supporters’ organization, which was also banned from the SPD. The party leadership engaged in a series of ugly smear campaigns against the dissenters, particularly Abendroth. However, the socialist Left’s alliance with IG Metall survived and went on to form the backbone of the anti-Emergency Act movement between 1958 and 1968.
A broad opposition movement in coalition with the extra-parliamentary opposition began when a Grand Coalition government was formed in 1966 under Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a known former member of the Nazi Party. The prospect of an independent left-socialist force outside the SPD now appeared to be emerging for the first time since 1945, but the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the establishment of the German Communist Party (DKP) in 1969 undermined that project. In the 1970s, debates within the Left continued to be characterized by the question of what position to take on the Eastern Bloc. While Abendroth and many of his students cultivated contacts within the DKP, his former allies on the editorial board of Sozialistische Politik were inveighing against the DKP faction within the unions.
Abendroth remained faithful to the struggle for fundamental rights, be it with respect to abortion or the public service bans. Very much in the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg, he defended democratic and social rights and freedoms as the lifeblood of the socialist movement. In a letter penned to Heinrich Böll in 1968, he wrote that one must “fight even for a 0.1 percent chance … so that the remnants of a democratic tradition can survive any drought, even in today’s Germany”.
Wolfgang Abendroth was granted emeritus status in 1972 and passed away on 15 September 1985.
Translated by Joseph Keady and Louise Pain for Gegensatz Translation Collective.