From Amsterdam we drove to Berlin in a rickety rental car which broke down in the middle of the GDR. We had been told how poor the workmanship of socialist repair stations was in the GDR and how difficult it was to obtain spare parts. We were lucky to find a small private garage that was able to fix our car.
In Berlin, I met several of the most important GDR historians. Except for Ernst Engelberg, who was in a sense the czar of the historical profession who enforced ideological conformity, all saw the shortcomings of the GDR regime, particularly its authoritarian aspects, and yet considered themselves loyal citizens of a socialist state. The two most impressive of them were Fritz Klein and Jürgen Kuczynski.
Fritz Fischer had told me that I must absolutely look up Klein in East Berlin. Klein was a good example of what was possible and impossible in the GDR. He came from an upper class Protestant family. His father had been a journalist for a very conservative, nationalistic paper in the Weimar Republic but no Nazi, and died mysteriously in the early days of the Nazi regime. After the death of both of his parents Klein was brought up in a Social Democratic family that was opposed to the Nazis, and who later were also critical of the dogmatic and authoritarian aspects of the Communists. Klein served in the German army on the Russian front, and came back totally disillusioned about the Germany that had made the Nazis possible. He was a loyal dissident until the collapse of the GDR, a man of integrity. Trusted in both the East and the West, he was called out of retirement in 1990 to head the Institute of History of the GDR Academy of Sciences in its final days.
In 1953 he became the first editor of the official GDR historical journal, the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (Journal for Historical Science), but was dismissed a few years later because of his insistence on scholarly standards and his commitment to opening the journal for discussions with non-Marxist and Western historians. Nevertheless, he kept his position in the Academy of Sciences. The academy in the GDR, as in other socialist countries, was centered on research, and possessed greater prestige than the teaching universities, but was also a place where scholars who were not quite trusted, were isolated from students.
Klein was very open with us when we met him, although he was quite aware of the limitations of the GDR. When he asked Wilma what first struck her in the GDR, she told him that in a book store window she had seen all sorts of books glorifying the leaders of the GDR and GDR society generally, while in the United States during the Vietnam War critical literature predominated. We were struck by Klein’s openness when he replied that he fully understood this contrast. The United States, he said, was a stable society. In the GDR everything was shaky.
At the time Klein was co-authoring a three volume work, Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg (Germany in the First World War), which proceeded from Marxist assumptions of the economic foundations of domestic and international politics, and came to similar conclusions about the role of the German government in the outbreak of the First World War, as did Fritz Fischer. Fischers study had relied heavily on government documents that Klein and his co-authors Willibald Gutsche and Joachim Petzold had provided concerning extensive empirical data on the role of industry. The three volumes, published the following year in 1968, were positively reviewed in major American, British, and French journals because of their solid research that was recognized as valid.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 146f