German History in Marxist Perspective : The East German Approach

Andreas Dorpalen's German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach is the most comprehensive study of historical scholarship in the former German Democratic Republic to have appeared in any language. His purpose is to analyze the way in which GDR historians, guided by the theoretical presuppositions of Marxist-Leninist ideology, have interpreted the German national past from the early Middle Ages to the present.

To accomplish his task, Dorpalen examined the mass of writing produced by historians of the GDR from the time the historical profession was reestablished in 1945. He thereby provides readers with access to historical literature that up to now has been largely ignored by English-speaking scholars.

Andreas Dorpalen was born in Berlin and received his law degree from the University of Bonn in 1933. He emigrated to the United States in 1936 where, for a time, he was a freelance writer for various newspapers and
magazines. In 1943, Dorpalen began his teaching career at Kenyon College in Ohio and subsequently taught at St. Lawrence University. From 1958 until his retirement in 1978, he was professor of German and European history at Ohio State University. He
was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1953-54 and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In addition to numerous articles, he wrote several books including Heinrich von
Treitschke and Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic.