Of Hungarian- and Romanian-Jewish extraction, he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust—deported by the Nazified Hungarian Kingdom in May 1944, he was held in extermination camps, and finally integrated with the Buchenwald resistance network.
Assisted by Jean Maitron and Ernest Labrousse, Georges found permanent employment at the École pratique des hautes études, later switching to its successor, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.
In his monographs on the Second International, he rediscovered the correspondence between Camille Huysmans and Vladimir Lenin, which allowed him to expose inaccuracies in the standard Marxist-Leninist accounts; he also curated a critical edition of autobiographical writings by the Old Bolsheviks, thus drawing attention to the ideological pluralism of Soviet Russia in the 1920s.
An early contributor to Le Maitron, he was involved in establishing an international network of scholars, using his familiarity with a wide array of languages; he worked with François Maspero on a corpus of forgotten socialist literature, with Lelio Basso on editions of Rosa Luxemburg's letters, and with Claudie Weill and Michael Löwy on a large-scale analysis about the interplay between "Marxisms" and nationalist movements.
[3] Haupt's mentor Ernest Labrousse reports that, as a child, he had already learned four languages—speaking German to his father, Hungarian to his mother, and Romanian to various members of his Transylvanian community, while having also picked up Yiddish from his family connections.
[4] At the age of sixteen, his native region, along with the rest of Northern Transylvania, were assigned to Regency Hungary, as part of the Second Vienna Award; as a result of Hungarian extermination policies, in May 1944 Haupt was deported to Auschwitz with his entire family, including a young brother.
According to Lemny, Haupt replicated propaganda against the old-regime historians, castigating Nicolae Iorga and Ștefan Ciobanu for having "falsified" the record; specifically, he argued that Cantemir had been a committed Russophile, and had been influenced by Russian philosophy down to his death.
[23] In November 1954, Haupt joined other scientists, including Constantinescu-Iași, Barbu Câmpina, Constantin Daicoviciu, Vasile Maciu, Alexandru Vianu, and Solomon Știrbu, in questioning Rollerian theses.
Mainly focused on revising the life and work of Constantin Dobrogeanu Gherea (presented here as the creator of a socialist movement in a "backward" country),[28] it came as a direct challenge to Roller's theses.
[29] Moreover, as noted by Andrea Panaccione and other scholars, Din istoricul had managed to subvert the history of Romania–Russia relations, an "obligatory" subject of late-stage Stalinism, by becoming the first of Haupt's monographs on the "geography of socialism".
He was disappointed to discover that Dej would only allow reform to cover a certain set of policies, by creating an "alliance between the apparatus and the bourgeois intelligentsia" around the tenets of Romanian nationalism, or national-communism.
[11] By April 1957, Haupt had been co-opted on the editorial board of the official Romanian historical treatise, working under a four-man panel of editors-in-chief (Constantinescu-Iași, Daicoviciu, Oțetea, and Roller).
[18] Dej, who had been vexed by Roller's interviews with party rivals, now populated the Institute of the History with reliable cadres, allowing the anti-Rollerist Haupt to achieve tenure around July 1958.
Also according to Labrousse, Haupt may have chosen to continue his work from Paris because of the prevailing Francophilia in his native Romania;[46] Camarero disputes this, arguing that he was primarily impressed by the quality of research at the Institut d'Histoire Sociale.
[49] Panaccione also notes: "Haupt recognized Rosenberg [...] as the engaged witness, capable of turning himself into a historian, and more generally as an example of the staunchly critical history of socialism, as informed by the political passion of a non-enlisted militant.
"[49] Labrousse reports that his pupil had passed examinations in Serbian and Bulgarian, could be heard speaking Turkish and "Flemish", and eventually became acquainted with "all European and American languages, from the Ural to the Pacific.
"[56] Rabinach notes that Haupt tried to balance these two positions by encouraging an internationalism based on "cooperation and respect", criticizing "national Marxism" as going too far in its attempts to revitalize theory.
[58] Some two years later, he and his wife both found permanent employment at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), within a section dealing with Soviet and Central European history.
[38] In 1962, Georges Haupt joined the editorial staff of Maitron's Le Mouvement Social, and a year later was assigned to a similar position at the Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique.
[65] Like various of his older colleagues (including Cole, Julius Braunthal, and James Joll), Haupt rebutted Comintern propaganda, as well as left-communist and Trotskyist narratives, about the Second International having "betrayed its own principles".
[67] Instead, he proposed a model in which the organization had naturally divided itself into newly solidified ideological camps—principally German Socialist (which had also subsumed Balkan movements with its intellectual prestige), but also Austromarxist, syndicalist, as well as Bolshevik.
[74] Alongside Jean-Jacques Marie (who was a committed Trotskyist),[71] Haupt also rediscovered, translated, and reprinted portions of the Granat Encyclopedic Dictionary that comprised autobiographical entries by the Old Bolsheviks, detailing their activities before and during the October Revolution.
[76] As noted by Panaccione, the work sampled Marc Bloch's approach to historiography (showing instances in which the autobiographies were unreliable), but also evidenced the freedom of discourse that still existed at the time when Granat had been put together.
By 1970, they were involved in transmitting samizdat works by Soviet thinkers, and publishing them in the outside world; Haupt personally handled Alexander Nekrich's June 22, 1941, translating it into French and German.
[83] The Romanian academic press occasionally discussed Haupt's new contributions—in 1977, Anale de Istorie described his presence and contribution at the Marxist Studies Week in Urbino, where Romania had been represented by Cristian Popișteanu and Florian Tănăsescu.
[89] On March 14, 1978,[90] Haupt died unexpectedly at Fiumicino Airport outside Rome, after having attended a conference; according to Jemnitz, the recorded myocardial infarction was in fact the effect of unbearable exhaustion.
[93] Also contributing to that issue, Rabinach noted Haupt's efforts in "reconstruct[ing] the Socialist historical tradition", a "political commitment to replacing myth with truth whatever the consequences.
[92] One of his posthumous articles, published in 1986, explained his commitment to Riazanov and Mehring, but also to James Guillaume, Ernst Jäckh, Jules-Louis Puech, and Max Nettlau, all of whom represented the "respect for truth".
[100] Haupt's legacy in literature includes a portrayal in a 1950s roman à clef, Meeting at the Last Judgment, put out by the Romanian former Marxist, Petru Dumitriu, who had himself defected to the West.
Silvestri, who defended national-communism as genuinely anti-Stalinist, commented: "Like so many other dogmatists, from so many a cultural field, [Haupt] is presently [sic] a fellow 'exile' of Vlad Georgescu's: two former Proletkult-type authors, 'liberalized' but fully conserving their erstwhile manias.