First Phase: Gradual Formation, 1950 to the Mid-1960S

chapter 2 First Phase: Gradual Formation, 1950 to the Mid-1960s

1 Social and Political Context

The first phase of the Marburg School developed in the context of the recon- struction, stabilisation, and expansion of capitalist relations of property and production inWest Germany,which had initially persisted in a latent form post- 1945.1The 1948 currency reform, however, represented a measure not only signi- fying a major rupture in terms of monetary policy but also laying the economic foundations for what soon led to the political division of Germany into two independent states, albeit controlled by the respective occupying powers: the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR).The Federal Republic’s integration into the Western sphere of influence, expressed economically by its membership in the European Coal and Steel Community (a common market for coal, iron, and steel and the predecessor to today’s European Union), and militarily in its joining NATO in 1955 negated all pro- spects for the development of an independent Federal Republic outside the influence of the Western great powers. Domestically, this corresponded not only to a nearly seamless reintegration of countless former Nazis into business, politics, the courts, and academia, but also to massive repression of opposi- tional political forces. Mass movements for democratising the economy (co- determination in the steel industry in 1951, the industrial relations law in 1952) were redirected and the broad popular opposition to remilitarisation neut- ralised, while more fundamental political opposition was forcibly repressed, such as the banning of the Communist Party (KPD). The transformation of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) from a workers’ party into a cross-class ‘people’s party’ (symbolised by the Godesberg Programme in 1959) deactivated the par- liament as a potential forum for the articulation of social and political altern- atives. As the newfound dynamism of West German capitalism introduced by the so-called ‘Miracle on the Rhine’ or Wirtschaftswunder brought with it a

1 The following sections on the social and political development of the Federal Republic are based on, among others, Fülberth 2012, Recker 2009, Wirsching 2006, Görtemaker 1999, Schildt and Siegfried 2009.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004410169_004 30 chapter 2 reduction in unemployment and rising living standards for the wage-earning population and the GDR exhibited little attraction as an alternative system, socialist thought and activity in West Germany was reduced to a shrinking minority of workers, trade union functionaries, left-wing Social Democrats, left- socialists, underground Communists, and a handful of intellectuals. It is unsurprising that anti-Communism managed to rise to the level of quasi-state doctrine under such conditions, placing even slightly divergent political opinions and activity under the general suspicion of being associ- ated with Communism.The mutually reinforcing dynamic of the ‘social market economy’, rising living standards, Western integration, and ideological demon- isation of all principally critical political aspirations facilitated a cross-party system consensus accompanied by a crippling, only rarely disturbed intellec- tual and cultural ‘graveyard quiet’. Yet the first signs of major turbulence in the capitalist process of accumulation would bring movement into these social relations, which had appeared forever insulated against economic dislocations and social inequalities. This development in turn brings us to several of the problems which repeatedly confronted the founders of the Marburg School, first and foremost Wolfgang Abendroth.

2 Wolfgang Abendroth (1906–85)

Wolfgang Abendroth was born the son of a middle school teacher in Elberfeld near the German city of Wuppertal in 1906.2 He spent his school years in Frank- furt am Main where he became active in left-wing youth organisations at a very young age. His criticisms of the KPD leadership’s ultra-left orientation led to his expulsion from the party in 1928, which he first joined in the early 1920s. He sub- sequently joined the Communist Party (Opposition), or KPO, which called for a united front policy between the rival currents of the workers’ movement. After studying law he worked as a junior lawyer without giving up his political activity, but could not finish his dissertation on industrial relations law following the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Despite the serious risks it entailed, Abendroth returned to Germany from Bern after completing a doctorate in international law in order to immediately resume illegal resistance work. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1937 and sentenced to four years in prison, but held fast to

2 A lively impression of Abendroth’s personal development can be found in the conversations conducted with Barbara Dietrich and Joachim Perels, see Dietrich and Perels 1976; see also the highly detailed Diers 2006.