Interview by Loren Balhorn

Theodor Bergmann, who passed away in 2017 at the age of 101, was the last of his kind. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1916, he gravitated to Germany’s explicitly socialist workers’ movement as a young boy and remained what he called a “critical Communist” for the rest of his life. Known among friends and comrades as “Young Theo,” he was, as Mario Kessler wrote, “the last participant and eyewitness to the German labor movement of the Weimar era.”

Influenced by his brothers, Bergmann joined the youth wing of the Communist Party (KPD) at age twelve. As political infighting in the party intensified, he sided with the “Right” current that was expelled from the KPD soon thereafter and formed the Communist Party (Opposition), or KPO, in 1929. He spent his school days helping out at the Junius Verlag, a KPO-aligned publishing house that produced a number of serious Marxist scholarly works and became the headquarters of many former KPD functionaries. Here, he came into close contact with deposed party leaders August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler, the latter of whom remained friends with Bergmann until his death in 1967.

After fleeing Germany for a kibbutz in British Palestine in 1933, Bergmann returned to Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland region in 1936 to engage in resistance work along the border to Nazi Germany. After the Sudetenland was itself annexed by Hitler, Bergmann escaped to neutral Sweden, where he spent most of World War II working on a farm. After the war, he returned to Germany and spent five years trying to unite the scattered networks of communist oppositionists in East and West into a small organization called Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik.

Frustrated by the grim political outlook facing the Left in the 1950s, he retired from political organizing and went on to become an accomplished agronomist. He studied the economies and agricultural development of the Global South extensively, publishing a major work, The Development Models of India, the Soviet Union and China: A Comparative Analysis, in 1977. Yet he remained deeply political, and when the West German left began to re-emerge in the 1960s, Bergmann served as a mentor to many young socialists including Rudi Dutschke, leader of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS).

After retiring from the University of Hohenheim in 1981, Bergmann spent the final decades of his life working as a scholar and historian of the workers’ movement, publishing dozens of books and articles and organizing and participating in numerous conferences. Through his deep personal connections to the communist opposition in particular, he became something of an unofficial historian of that current in the German-speaking world. Even after his one-hundredth birthday, he was an active member of Die Linke and contributed as much as he could to his local branch’s education committee.

I met Theodor in his modest apartment on the outskirts of Stuttgart, Germany in October 2016 to interview him about his experiences and his views on politics and life. As he welcomed me into his home, a painting on the wall caught my eye. Theodor chuckled. “Oh, do you like that? That’s from Robert Liebknecht, Karl Liebknecht’s son. He was a friend of mine.”

Bergmann proved to be an engaging conversationalist and a treasure trove of anecdotes throughout our seven-hour conversation, telling personal stories about figures he’d encountered and deploying a veritably encyclopedic knowledge of the socialist movement. Speaking with him felt a bit like peering into a lost political world — the eradication of which he was keenly aware. Nevertheless, as Theodor stressed during our discussion, “a Communist doesn’t whine” — he gets back to work. That same spirit animated a documentary film about him released to mark his ninetieth birthday, appropriately titled Dann fangen wir von vorne an — “Then we’ll start from the beginning.”

With Theodor’s passing, we lost the last living connection to the classical socialist movement. It can never be recovered. But if nothing else, its history, as recorded by Theodor Bergmann and countless others, offers our generation of socialists at least a glimpse of what monumental progress — and tragic missteps — become possible when socialist organization is rooted in the working class on a mass scale. And for that, we owe them all a debt of gratitude.