[1] Before 1989 he was a senior staff member of the Berlin-based Marxism–Leninism Institute attached to the ruling Socialist Unity Party of (East) Germany,[2] and serving as its director for not quite two and a half eventful years, starting on 21 December 1989.
[3] Benser was born into a working-class family in Heidenau, a small manufacturing town which he himself recently (in 2015) described as a "product of the rapid industrialisation of Saxony during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries".
He was also a member of the Council for Historical Studies ("Rat für Geschichtswissenschaft") and worked for the National Historians' Committee of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
[1][6] The Marxism–Leninism Institute in Berlin where Benser worked for more than three decades was tightly regulated till 1971, a period during which according to at least one source Walter Ulbricht, the country's leader, appeared to see himself as the nation's top historian.
[3] During the forty-year existence of the German Democratic Republic Benser published numerous articles and compilations concerned with the history of the country's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED) and of communism more generally.