Background
Albert Norden was born in Silesia, one of the five recorded children born to a liberal rabbi called Joseph Norden (1870-1943) and his wife, Emilie Meseritz/Norden (1876-1931).
journalist politician university professor
Albert Norden was born in Silesia, one of the five recorded children born to a liberal rabbi called Joseph Norden (1870-1943) and his wife, Emilie Meseritz/Norden (1876-1931).
He went into exile during Nazi rule. He returned to Germany after the war, and became an important politician in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). A writer of several works, Norden authored the 1965 Braunbuch.
In 1919 he joined the Young Communist League of Germany.
From 1923 onwards, he held editorial positions in various communist publications. Between 1931-1933 he was the editor of Rote Fahne ("Red Flag").
In 1933 Norden emigrated to France. He also spent time in exile in Denmark and Czechoslovakia.
In 1938 he returned to France.
Norden was detained in France 1939-1940. In 1941, he was able to emigrate to the United States. During World World War II, his father died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. in Paris and New York he worked with various popular front publications.
He wrote some chapters, dealing with the international linkages of the German NSDAP, in the widely read 1933 Braunbuch über Reichstagsbrand und Hitlerterror ("on Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror").
In October 1946 he returned to Berlin, where he became editor of the weekly Deutschlands Stimme ("Voice of Germany"). In 1949 he was assigned as head of the Press Section of the Information Department of Ministerial Council of the German Democratic Republic, working under Gerhart Eisler.
In December 1952 he was purged from his position in the Press Department, but obtained a professorship at Humboldt University. He was elected as one of the secretaries of the Central Committee.
Norden served as head of the Agitation Committee of the Political Bureau, 1955-1967.
He was in-charge of the Information & Foreign Department of the Political Bureau until 1979. In 1960 he became the head of the "West Commission". In June 1965 Norden suggested that regional elections in the German Democratic Republic should be open for alternate candidates.
In April 1981 the then ailing Norden was left out of the Central Committee and Political Bureau at the 10th SED party congress.
In the same year he left the Volkskammer and State Council positions. After the war Norden argued in several publications, articles and speeches that there was a direct continuation between the Hitler and Adenauer governments.
The book became a reference in the West German New Left, which increasingly had begun to question the official historiography on the Nazi period. Norden was born into a Jewish petty bourgeois family, the son of a rabbi.
As an adult, Norden declined to identify himself as a Jew.
He was however, one of the most prominent persons of Jewish origin in East German society.
In 1954 he became director of the National Council of the National Front for a Democratic Germany. In 1955, he became a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). In 1965 the National Front published a work by Norden, Braunbuch (""), in which he accused over 1,900 politicians, state officials and other prominent persons in West Germany of having worked for the Nazi regime in the past
Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany]
The following year he became a member of the Communist Party of Germany. In 1958 he became a member of the Political Bureau of the party. In 1958 he became a member of the Volkskammer (People"s Chamber, the parliament of the German Democratic Republic).
In 1963 Norden became a member of the National Defense Council, a post he held until 1979.
In 1976 he became a member of the State Council.