Background
Havemann, Robert was born on March 11, 1910 in Munich.
chemist Dissident member of the Volkskammer
Havemann, Robert was born on March 11, 1910 in Munich.
He studied chemistry in Berlin and Munich from 1929 to 1933, and then later received a doctorate in physical chemistry from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
Havemann joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1932 and was one of the founders of the resistance group, European Union. lieutenant was in connection with this group that he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. He received a death sentence, but his execution was continually postponed because of the intervention of former colleagues, who insisted that Havemann was as important as his work on chemical weapons had been and that he was still needed to explain the research.
His execution was postponed so many times, he was able to survive until the Brandenburg-Görden Prison was liberated by the Red Army.
He continued his scientific work in the institute until he got barred from his laboratory in January 1950. He then became a professor of physical chemistry at the Humboldt Un Berlin.
This continued until his death in 1982, after a long time suffering from lung disease. In 2005, Havemann was awarded the title Righteous among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.
After the war, he became head of administration in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin, but in 1948 he was dismissed from this position due to political pressure from the American authorities in West Berlin. In 1963 he lectured on "Scientific Aspects of Philosophical Problems" (published as "Dialectic without Dogmatism—Natural Sciences against Communistic Ideology") and was expelled from the ruling Socialist Unity Party and dismissed from the University—officially because he gave an interview to a newspaper from West Germany. He continued his work as a socialist critic and was put under house arrest in 1976, at his home in the village of Grünheide.
In 1989 he was politically rehabilitated by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
Havemann’s critical thought is closely bound up with his political position. In 1943 he received a death sentence for his anti-fascist activities, but was reprieved and kept in prison because of the importance of his scientific research. As a research fellow at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute after the Second World War he vigorously opposed American nuclear armament. During his time at Humboldt University he was fiercely critical of dogmatic communism, and in 1964 was expelled from the Socialist Union Party and the University. His early criticisms were directed chiefly at Lysenko’s claim that acquired characteristics may be passed on to progeny and at many elements in the doctrine of mechanical materialism. He propounded the view that a ‘second step’, an overthrowing of ‘the critical stagnation, the sclerosis of Marxism’, was needed to take communism from a position of public ownership of the means of production to a politically democratic system. Following Laotse, he held that ‘the more things there are in the world that one is forbidden to do, the more the people are impoverished’. Havemann's advocacy of reform developed into a thoroughgoing dissidence. In later life he became deeply concerned with ecological issues, arguing that ecological catastrophe would be averted only by transition to a socialist democracy in the East that would then generate a socialist revolution in the West. Leszek Kolakowski has described him as one of the most important of the revisionists. He remained staunchly Marxist throughtout.
German Academy of Sciences at Berlin. European Union.
