Karl Obermann

Karl Obermann (22 September 1905 – 10 July 1987) was a German historian. He became the first director of the Historical Institute of the (East) German Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Karl Obermann was born in Cologne. His father was a factory worker. There was no money for him to progress to a university level education so after leaving secondary school he undertook an apprenticeship in technical drawing. Obermann became unemployed in 1928. He was able to attend lectures at the university in Sociology and Economic History as a "guest attendee". During this time he was supporting himself, at least in part, through freelance journalism. Obermann discovered the young socialist movement through the "Wandervogel" hiking clubs. Sources are not unanimous on the date, but it seems most likely that following several year as an active member of the Young Socialists, it was in 1931, by now aged 23, that he joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD). Two years later he switched to the newly formed Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SAPD), which had been formed by SPD members who had become convinced that the best chance of reversing the surge in support for nationalist populism lay in uniting the SPD and the Communist Party. That aspiration failed spectacularly. In January 1933 the Nazis took power and lost no time in transforming the country into a one-party dictatorship. The SAPD never became more than a minority leftwing fringe group which fizzled out after 1945. With the Nazis in power, people with a political past were persecuted and in many cases arrested. Others fled. In 1933 Karl Obermann emigrated via Belgium to Paris which was rapidly becoming a focus for growing numbers of exiled German communists and other left-wing activists. In Paris during the 1930s Obermann was able to work as a free-lance journalist for various German language newspapers and magazines, reflecting the number of German political exiles living in the city.