Jonas Leib "Leo" Stern (26 March 1901 – 2 January 1982) was an Austrian-German left-wing political activist. In 1933 he switched his party membership from the Social Democratic Party to the Communist Party. During the fascist ascendancy he participated in the Spanish Civil War as an anti-Franco Interbrigadist and later, in the Great Patriotic War, served as an officer in the Soviet Red Army. Between the two he studied successfully for a higher degree at the University of Moscow, receiving his Habilitation degree in 1940 in return for a dissertation on Contemporary Catholicism.
Emerging from the war in 1945 committed to Soviet-style communism, he made his home in occupied Vienna where he taught at the university. In 1950 he relocated to the newly launched Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany), taking East German citizenship in 1952. He made his home at Halle, accepting a teaching position at the university and quickly becoming one of the best known Marxist historians in the country. Between 1953 and 1959 he served as University Rector (Chief Officer and Administrator) at the merged (since 1817) Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg.
Life and works Provenance and early years Jonas Leib Stern was born into a large Jewish family at Voloka, a village near Czernowitz (as Chernivtsi was then known). Today (since 1991) the region is part of Ukraine, but at the time of Leib's birth it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire: between (approximately) 1920 and the Second World War it was part of Romania. His father, Zalman Stern (1861–1901/2), is described as a farmer-businessman. Jonas was the youngest of his parents' twelve recorded children born between 1888 and 1901. His three elder brothers included the communist activists Manfred Stern (1896–1954), believed to have worked for Soviet intelligence in China the United States, and Wolfgang "Wolf" Stern (1897–1961), a military historian. (The fourth of the brothers, Dr. Filipp Stern, left less of a footprint in the historical record of twentieth century political activism.)
1901 (applying the Gregorian calendar) was the year both of the Leo Stern's birth and of his father's death. The region in which he was born and grew up was an impoverished one. Jonas Leib grew up with his mother, born Henriette "Yetty" Korn (1863–1934) and siblings, in circumstances of some poverty. At the age of ten he was already working in order to pay for his own schooling, doing odd jobs and tutoring. His school costs were also subsidised by means of a small bursary. Despite the financial pressures he attended both elementary and secondary schools at Czernowitz, passing his Matura (school graduation exam) in 1921. By that time he had already, in 1918, joined the Young Socialists.
Vienna On leaving school he moved to Vienna, registering his residency in the Austrian capital on 14 October 1921. It was normal across the Austrian empire for citizens to register their place of residence with the local town hall: he registered under the name "Jonas Leib" and entered his citizenship as Romanian, reflecting recent frontier changes. More intriguingly, when registering his residency he gave his religion as Muslim and his mother tongue as German There is also a reference in at least one source to his having worked as a middle-school teacher on conclusion of his school career, which probably reflected the need to "work his way" through his university-level education. 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. He studied Jurisprudence, Applied Economics (Nationalökonomie) and History. It was also in 1921 that Leo Stern became a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ).
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). From a Marxist perspective, the politics of the university were overwhelmingly "Bourgeois" and conservative. Grünberg, Adler and Kelsen stood out as professors around whom the relatively few left-wing students tended to gravitate.
Having obtained his residency permit in 1921, on 23 September 1923 he took citizenship from the city authorities, and then on 2 October 1923 took the vow that made him a citizen of Austria. At this point he gave his residence as Porzellangasse 53, in the "Vienna 9" (Alsergrund) quarter, a five-minute walk from the university main building.Aufnahmeschrift des magistratischen Bezirksamtes für den 9. Bezirk vom 2. Oktober 1923, IX – 7333 aus 1923 aufgrund der Verfügung des Wiener Magistrats, Abtlg.50, als politische Landesbehörde vom 20. September 1923, M.Abt. 50/III/15872/1923.
In 1925 Stern earned his doctorate ("Doctor rerum politicarum") with a dissertation on the modalities of Mercantilism. This work was supervised by Carl Grünberg. He now stayed on at the university, working as a personal research assistant for Max Adler till 1932. He combined this with a teaching job at the Adult Education Centre in Vienna between 1927 and 1934. There are various references to his having engaged during this period as an education advisor to the "Free Trades Unions" organisation. In addition, between 1926 and 1934, Stern headed up the "Marxism Study Group" (Marxistische Studiengemeinschaft) at the university department of Socio-economics. He taught a number of one and two years courses on various related topics, falling under the broad subject areas of "Sociology" and "Applied Economics". 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". They were published not under a name by which he was commonly known, but using one of three pseudonyms: F. Schneider, L. Taylor and L. Hofmeister. 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.
Stern was also engaged in terms of more direct political involvement. As in much of the rest of Europe, so in Austria, the later 1920s were a period of intensifying political polarisation both among the politicians in Vienna and on the streets, and the tensions were only exacerbated by the economic austerity that arrived as part of the powerful backwash of the Wall Street crash. In 1927 Stern was still a member of the Social Democratic Party, although he was regarded by many, including himself, as part of the party's extreme left-wing. He participated in the 1927 "July revolt", teaming up with his comrade Ernst Fischer with whom he worked closely. Later, probably during the early or middle 1930s, there would be a spectacular falling out between the two men. Although for many years, out of respect for party discipline, Stern set aside or concealed his dislike of his former partner in activist politics, it is clear from a letter that he wrote in 1968 to Eduard Rabofsky (1911–1994), that under the surface, Stern's mistrust and loathing of Fischer persisted.
At the government level, during 1933 events in Austria broadly tracked those in Germany. In March 1933 all three speakers of the National Council (the principal power-house of the Austrian parliament) resigned and Chancellor Dollfuss determined that parliament had eliminated itself. Opposition parties proved ineffectual in their attempts to re-establish parliamentary governance, and government by decree became the default mechanism for controlling the country. A rapid slide towards post-democratic "Austro-Fascism" followed. Among Social Democratic Party activists there was intense frustration at the seeming unwillingness or inability of the party leadership to prevent this political catastrophe; and there was a growing view, especially on the left of the party, that when it came to preparations for defending workers' rights in a fascist state, the Communist Party was organising itself more effectively than the SPÖ. Throughout much of 1933 Stern seems to have been in touch with Communist Party activists in Vienna, and in October of that year he made the switch, quitting the SPÖ and joining the KPÖ. A number of workers, students and intellectuals in his immediate circle followed his example. The move came shortly after an ideological and political break between Stern and his old mentor, Max Adler. Stern would remain an influential member of the Austrian Communist Party till 1950, though for most of that time he would be exiled, like many Austrian Communist leaders and other politically engaged comrades, in Moscow.
In 1934 it was, accordingly, as a Communist that Leo Stern took part, in Vienna, in the brief but intensely brutal February uprising. Sources are largely silent as to the nature of his contribution. He was arrested and taken into police detention on 18 February 1934. 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. After his release, which took place on 15 July 1934, Stern returned to his "party work", which by this point had become unambiguously illegal. 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). Meanwhile the party sustained an "underground" organisation structure into which Stern was drawn, becoming at some stage Head of the Propaganda Department of the Party Central Committee. There was always an element of uncertainty as to how much or how little the authorities knew about Leo Stern's secret party work, but in the early Autumn/Fall of 1935, believing him to be in danger of imminent police arrest, the party leaders, who were by this time themselves based in Czechoslovakia, ordered Leo Stern to join them in Prague. This he did in October 1935.
Prague Stern remained in Prague for slightly more than half a year, during which he authored a work on "the left-wing opposition from within the Social Democratic Party of Austria" In May 1936, again in compliance with party instructions, he emigrated again, this time to the Soviet Union. Although Russia would be his home base for almost ten years, his initial stay there would be relatively brief.
Moscow In Moscow he was accommodated in the famous Hotel Lux, a large luxury hotel opened in 1911 as the "Hotel Franzija" (Гостиница Франция), and subsequently further enlarged. By the time of Stern's arrival it had become home to large numbers of political exiles and (in some cases) their families. Most had fled from Germany in the aftermath of 1933. 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. Leo Stern as well as two of his three brothers, Manfred and Wolf Stern, all lived at the Hotel Lux during the later 1930s. During this time he was employed as a tutor-lecturer at the International Lenin School. He combined this with work in the press department of the Comintern; and he contributed as an "editor" in respect of new German language versions of "classic works" of "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism".
Spanish Civil War