Wolfgang Abendroth
Abendroth was a radical social democrat and an important contributor to the constitutional foundation of post-World War II West Germany.
Due to his socialist principles and politics Abendroth was for many years after the end of the war under surveillance by West Germany's Intelligence services.
According to the biography[1] provided by the German Resistance Memorial Center: Abendroth was born in Elberfeld in 1906 and grew up in a family of Social Democrats.
In February 1937 he was arrested by the Gestapo and on November 30, 1937, the higher regional court in Kassel sentenced him to four years in prison for high treason, which he served in Luckau.
[2] After his release in June 1941, Abendroth moved to his parents in Potsdam-Babelsberg and worked first as an auditing assistant for the accountant and tax consultant Erhard Oewerdieck and then as a business lawyer for a foreign trade company in Berlin.
According to Abendroth, this anti-fascist cell prevented the destruction of Lemnos's electricity generation unit that was planned by the German occupation forces as part of their retreat in 1944.
Against the background of the Labor Party's election victory in July 1945, Abendroth discussed the prospects for the workers' movement in Germany with Löwenthal.
Subsequently, Abendroth returned to Potsdam, with an unofficial letter of recommendation written by Zinn for Eugen Schiffer, the head of the judicial administration of the SBZ.
Thus, in January 1947, Abendroth was appointed judge at the Potsdam Regional Court while on 1 April 1947 he entered the service of the Brandenburg Ministry of Justice, as a member of the government council.
Since Abendroth was officially registered in West Berlin, he did not automatically become a member of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (German: Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) after the forced union of the SPD and KPD.
Instead, he remained an illegal member of the Social Democrats and maintained covert contact with the SPD's East Office (Ostbüro), headed by Stephan Thomas.
Against the background of the repression against those Social Democrats who refused to join the SED, he moved to the western occupation zones and negotiated through his friend Herbert Komm, who worked as a lawyer in Berlin, with the Lower Saxony Minister of Education, Adolf Grimme, about an appointment to the newly founded University of Applied Sciences in Wilhelmshaven-Rüstersiel.
Abendroth spoke out against the emerging formation of the bloc system, but promised not to allow himself to be instrumentalized against socialism in the East, since he remained a socialist despite giving up his activities.
During Abedroth's period as an academic in Marburg took place the so-called Forsthoff-Abendroth controversy about the importance of the welfare state in West Germany's Basic Law (constitution).
After the latter turned down the "too left" Jürgen Habermas the young philosopher approached Abendroth [12] and, eventually, produced what became a classic text of modern European political theory under the title The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.
Abendroth left no stone unturned to bring exiles and resistance fighters like Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse or Leo Kofler into the discussion about filling professorships.
[16] In 1959 Abendroth took a critical stance towards the Godesberg Program, which represented a fundamental change in the orientation and goals of the SPD away from its class politics and Marxian heritage towards reforming, rather than rejecting, capitalism.
Direct political participation outside the representative strictures of the parliamentary system would help build the active democratic citizenry needed to withstand the forces of "restoration".
In the wider public they would help alter the reigning spirit of advanced capitalist society, replacing profit motive with democratic cooperation.
Abendroth announced that, together with the Berlin political scientist Ossip K. Flechtheim and other social democratic university teachers, he would prove in court that authoritarian tendencies that contradict the Basic Law were increasing in the SPD.
Together with Ernst Bloch, Ossip K. Flechtheim and Erich Kästner he was a member of the board of trustees of the Campaign for Democracy and Disarmament (Kampagne für Demokratie und Abrüstung) in West Germany at the end of the 1960s.
Furthermore, as a member of the initiative committee of defense attorneys in political criminal matters headed by Walter Ammann, he campaigned for the lifting of the KPD ban and for the re-admission of a communist party in the Federal Republic of Germany.
The "Association of Democratic Scientists", which he co-founded as a reaction to the Marburg Manifesto, was therefore intended to protect individual freedom of research from attacks by society.
According to a report on Gehlen's activities:[19] [t]he archive material includes a carefully composed dossier on the lawyer and political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth, who was banned from working as a legal trainee in 1933 due to his socialist leanings.
[20][21] Originally, the group had formed as a reaction to the government policy they criticized as neoliberal, in particular the package of measures referred to as Agenda 2010, of the red-green coalition.
