An anti-fascist under a death sentence, a SED-loyal chemist and party official, a heavily persecuted opposition figure who refused to emigrate to the West right until the end of his life: Robert Havemann and his political life in the GDR were and remain exceptional. His courageous stance, his concept of freedom and the political experiences he gathered over a lifetime made him a symbol of the GDR opposition.

Robert Havemann was born in Munich on 11 March 1910. His mother was a painter, his father a teacher, writer and editor. He earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Berlin in 1935. Earlier, in 1933, he had joined “Neu Beginnen” (Begin Anew), a resistance group made up of opposition KPD and SPD members. In July 1943, he helped to found the “Europäische Union” (European Union), a resistance group that established ties with illegal organisations of foreign forced labourers and helped to hide Jewish people at risk of deportation. In the autumn of 1943, several members of the group were arrested with no warning. Havemann and 13 others were condemned to death by the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof). However, Havemann’s scientist friends managed to obtain several stays of execution on the grounds that his research was important for the war effort. He built a radio receiver and put out an illegal daily news sheet “Der Draht” for the other prisoners from his death row cell, where he was supposed to be continuing his research.

In July of 1945, after the fall of the Nazi dictatorship and the end of the World War II, the Soviet and East German Communists appointed Havemann to head the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin’s Dahlem district, in what would become the American sector. Throwing himself into the work to create a new, anti-fascist society, he became a member of the Central Committee for the Victims of Fascism and co-founded the “Kulturbund” (Cultural Association). The Soviet secret service recruited him to report on the surviving members of the “Begin Anew” who were active within the SPD in trying to prevent their party’s forced merger with the CPD to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The secret service stopped contacting Havemann in 1948, as he had not provided them with any useful information. That same year, the Americans, who had grown suspicious of him, insisted that he be removed from his post as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, though they allowed him to stay on as a department head. He was dismissed entirely in February 1950 after criticising American plans to develop a hydrogen bomb in the SED newspaper “Neues Deutschland”.

Havemann moved to the GDR, where he was given a professorship and appointed as director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität. In 1951, he joined the SED and took up several political and scientific posts. He represented the Cultural Association in the GDR’s national legislature, the Volkskammer, until 1963. In February 1956, shortly before Khrushchev gave his secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which came as quite a shock to him, Havemann agreed to act as a secret informer for the GDR Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) and sound out Western scientists like Werner Heisenberg and Max Born and try to convince them to defect to the GDR. Having grown suspicious of their own informer, though, the MfS put him under surveillance in 1959. Then, in 1964, MfS launched a fully-fledged operation against him, during what was to be his last lecture series.

The cautious revelations about Stalin’s crimes at the 20th CPSU Congress having taught Havemann to adopt a critical perspective of his own, and he began to call for the de-Stalinisation of the SED. At party meetings, he described the *Polish strikes in June 1956 and the *Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as a push for democratisation that the communist parties should act on and called for freedom of information and expression, explaining that these were necessary to overcome Stalinism. In a lecture at a colloquium in September 1962, he stated that the official representatives of Marxism were well on their way to completely discrediting it. Since the lecture could not be published, Havemann mailed his manuscript to people in and outside of the country. He was barred from the Party leadership at the university in 1963 as a result.

In the winter semester of 1963/64, Robert Havemann gave a remarkable last lecture series, “Natural science aspects of philosophical problems”, which drew an audience of more than 1,000 people from all over the GDR and from West Berlin. The written versions of the lectures were copied and disseminated by students. In these lectures, Havemann presented his notion of the freedom of the individual in socialism: “Freedom is only desirable, is only moral when it is not the freedom of individuals, but the freedom of all. [...] We will only have true freedom when there is a wide range of options for everything we do and do not do [...], so that each one of us can act entirely in accordance with his individual aspirations, not be curtailed and constrained by regulations, orders and rules.”

The SED leadership saw in this a threat to its rule. Havemann was dismissed from his post as professor with immediate effect and expelled from the party. The official grounds were that he had been quoted in a Hamburg newspaper as saying that GDR citizens ought to have more freedom than the citizens of Western countries because socialism could only succeed if this were the case. His dismissal from the photochemistry laboratory (Arbeitsstelle für Photochemie) in December 1965 and expulsion from the Academy of Sciences led to a permanent ban preventing him from working as a scientist. This was triggered by an article he wrote on the approval of the registration of the KPD as a political party in West Germany, in which he called for the democratic reform of the SED. The SED launched a political and journalistic campaign aimed at Havemann’s “political-ideological destruction and isolation”.

Werner Theuer
Translated from the German by Alison Borrowman
Last updated: 09/16