[2] Directly after registering his residency he enrolled for what turned out to be a four-year lower and higher degree course at the University Faculty of Laws and Political Sciences, in time for the winter term of 1921/22.
[2] According to Stern's own later recollection, the three professors at the University of Vienna who most influenced his thinking and future course were the philosopher-historian Carl Grünberg (1861–1940), the jurist-politician Max Adler (1873–1937) and the noted legal scholar Hans Kelsen (1881–1973).
[6] Much of the same teaching material also turned up in his contributions on political-history to left-wing political journals and magazines, such as "Der Kampf", "Arbeit und Wirtschaft", "Die Weltbühne" and "Internationale Rundschau".
[3][7] He also found time to continue with his own academic studies, obtaining his Absolutorium in 1927 or 1928, and then pursuing his researches "on the state theory of Marxism" in preparation for a dissertation intended to lead to a habilitation degree.
At some stage during the next five months he was moved to a section of the vast former munitions factory at Wöllersdorf (a short distance to the south of Vienna) that had been converted the previous year into a detention camp.
He worked in the party "Agitation Department", based in the study-library of the Vienna Chamber of Labour (AK), supported by the pioneer of "Popular Education" (Volksbildung), Viktor Matejka (1901–1993).
Other nationalities were already well represented among the "guests", however, including Austrians, and the hotel was by this time being used as an informal headquarters location for exiled communist parties from various countries in central and western Europe.
Many comrades who had escaped from political or race driven persecution in Germany and Austria earlier in the decade were being summarily arrested by the authorities and shot or deported to concentration camps far away from Moscow.
Kirsanowa, who at this time was a leading figure at the People's Commissariat for Education and at the International Lenin School, based her support for Stern's appointment partly on articles he had recently had published in Soviet specialist journals.
She may also have been impressed by three substantial essays Stern had produced back in Vienna, when still under the mentorship of Max Adler, and from which lengthy exerts had subsequently been reproduced in Soviet academic publications during 1936/37.
According to detailed biographical essay provided by the University of Halle, where Leo Stern built his career and considerable reputation as a historian after 1950, the Moscow habilitation qualification has "still not been authenticated".
Of possibly greater immediate importance in terms of Soviet strategic objectives was the work Stern undertook with Johann Koplenig to create a "Committee of Austrian Liberation Movements".
He continued to serve as a senior Red Army officer of the Soviet Control Commission in Vienna till 1950, despite having been "demobilised" in respect of military operations in September 1945.
According to sources drawing on information subsequently approved by the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party, Stern loyally complied with the orders relayed to him by his commanding officer and helped push through the Renner appointment.
Stern shared his recollections of the matter later with his friend, the antifascist jurist Eduard Rabofsky: "Let me tell you, I was one of the political officers in the army staff meeting at Hochwolkersdorf who took an unchanging and very well based position against calling in Renner.
But after several days, when a statement came through directly from Moscow about my opinions, General Sheltov, the commander of the political department of the 3rd Ukrainian Front [which had just liberated Vienna from fascism] ordered me not to utter another word about Karl Renner.
[1][2] By 1947 it was obvious that the politics of the Austrian Communist Party, and across occupied Austria more generally, were not unfolding as Leo Stern had hoped; while he himself had less power to influence events than, given his own links to Soviet military leaders and intelligence circles, he might have anticipated.
[3] It was probably soon after arriving with the Soviet liberating army that, in 1945, Leo Stern met and married Alice Melber, hitherto a young anti-fascist resistance activist under the German "occupation".
[4] Early in 1950, in response to an invitation received from the Minister for People's Education in the State government for Saxony-Anhalt, Leo Stern relocated with his family to Halle to what had been administered, till a few months earlier, as the Soviet occupation zone of Germany.
[1] He was the fifth "big fish" among Marxist historians appointed to top university positions in the German Democratic Republic following the country's launch, after Jürgen Kuczynski, Alfred Meusel (both at Berlin since 1946), Walter Markov and Ernst Engelberg (at Leipzig since 1948 and 1949).
[1][2] As early as 1951, Leo Stern was appointed University pro-rector, with direct responsibility for the politically important "Basic Social Sciences" course which all students were required to complete as a precondition for progressing to their chosen degree subjects.
They had been united (with others) by a shared determination to re-establish and re-launch Austrian scholarship through the working together of all academics keen to establish a new world, based on truth and reality, unclouded by illusion.
Also controversial among comrades at the university was the way in which Stern was content to appoint former Nazis to professorial chairs, and, where appropriate, reappoint them, provided they proved dutiful and compliant backers of the party under the new kind of one-party dictatorship that had been installed in the East German state, built according to Soviet-style Leninist-Socialist principles, on foundations that had, before 1949, been the Soviet occupation zone.
[2] From the point of view of sympathetic sources, Stern felt secure in the belief that he had come across plenty of committed left-winger activists who, having once acquired status and position, had been content to betray and abandon the labour movement.
[1][17] It was noted that despite his own Jewish provenance and record as a Red Army officer in the war against Hitler's Germany, at the ZfG, just as with his appointments at the university, he never shied away from commissioning contributions from scholars identified as "former Nazis", just as long as they demonstrated appropriate historical knowledge, insight and detachment in their submissions.
[2] Stern also instigated the launch of the series "Archivalische Forschungen zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung" (loosely, "Archival Researches on the History of the German Labour Movement").
That it nevertheless failed demonstrates, in the opinion of one commentator, determination on the part of a small number of influential activist hard-line communists in the party hierarchy to crush and eliminate "bourgeois thinking" among academic colleagues during the early years of the East German dictatorship.
With regard to "bourgeois thinking" it may have counted against Stern's candidacy that one of his four proposers was a former member of the National Socialist ("Nazi") Party (albeit – as far as one can tell – fully exonerated and/or rehabilitated after 1945) and another had spent the Hitler years exiled in Switzerland.
Steinitz was a close friend of Jürgen Kuczynski who, despite his slightly semi-detached attitude to the political establishment, had achieved iconic status with party leaders, partly on account of his long-standing ties to Soviet intelligence.
[22] Although his published works on the history of the labour movement and his tally of awards during the 1960s demonstrate the effectiveness of his determination to sustain good relations with the party establishment, it is evident that he continued to be a focus of mistrust at some levels inside the homeland security services.