The Galileo of the GDR: Robert Havemann

Abstract

The following portrait is a tribute to Robert Havemann, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death in January 2007. Largely forgotten, Havemann deserved to be remembered as one of the leading dissidents of the German Democratic Republic and as a courageous and outspoken critic of state injustices. A leading physicist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute during the Third Reich and until the mid-1960s in the GDR, Havemann grew from being a loyal Party man in the early years of the GDR, to its fiercest intellectual critic and indeed his generation's conscience during the last two decades of his life.

Notes

¹ Havemann's code name in the Stasi files remained his self-selected pseudonym “Leitz.” These documents have been copied and archived by the Robert Havemann Society in Berlin. He was reportedly the GDR citizen with the largest Stasi file—by a wide margin. (By the time of the GDR's dissolution in 1990, the Stasi had 91,000 permanent and 174,000 unofficial employees, of which 109,000 were spies.)

² On the life and struggle of Havemann, see also Hannemann; and Müller and Florath.