Georges Haupt information

Georges Haupt, born Gheorghe Mathe Haupt, also known as George or György Máthé Haupt (January 18, 1928 – March 14, 1978), was Romanian and French historian of socialism, publisher and journalist, politically active in the Romanian Communist Party until 1958. Of Hungarian- and Romanian-Jewish extraction, he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust—deported by the Nazified Hungarian Kingdom in May 1944, he was held in extermination camps, and finally integrated with the Buchenwald resistance network. He chose to settle in the Kingdom of Romania, which was then under a Soviet occupation, and which became a communized country in early 1948. As an affiliate of the governing party (known as the "Workers' Party" for much of his career), Haupt was involved in the transition to Marxist historiography and contributed to official propaganda, writing mostly in Romanian. After a stint at Bolyai University, he completed his studies at Leningrad State University, and published some of his research in the Soviet Union; his writings were generally focused on political, literary and labor history, evidencing the civilizational ties between the Russian Empire and the Balkans. While confirming to the normative requirements of Stalinism, and working under official historians such as Petre Constantinescu-Iași, Haupt thus began exploring his own interest in the "geography of socialism".

After 1954, Haupt rallied with Constantinescu-Iași and Andrei Oțetea, in curbing the influence exercised in academia by Mihail Roller. While he initially opposed Roller from a Marxist-Leninist position, he soon became supportive of De-Stalinization and "national Marxism" throughout the Eastern Bloc. Though he became a suspect for his presence in Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and his prolonged contacts with the anti-Stalinist left, he was still allowed to climb through the Romanian political hierarchy; upon ousting Roller, the communist apparatus had embraced a Romanian national-communism, which discovered Haupt as a contextual ally. Haupt himself preferred liberal Marxism with a focus on proletarian internationalism, and was therefore pushed into an ideological conflict with the national-communists. He and his wife, Ruth Fabian, ultimately defected to France in 1958, being welcomed into the scholarly community of that country. Assisted by Jean Maitron and Ernest Labrousse, Georges found permanent employment at the École pratique des hautes études, later switching to its successor, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Paris.

In this final stage of his career, Haupt valued historical objectivity, which he believed could be developed as a self-critical component within militant Marxism. He questioned the myth-making narratives of all major leftist dogmas, testing their validity against the historical record. In his monographs on the Second International, he rediscovered the correspondence between Camille Huysmans and Vladimir Lenin, which allowed him to expose inaccuracies in the standard Marxist-Leninist accounts; he also curated a critical edition of autobiographical writings by the Old Bolsheviks, thus drawing attention to the ideological pluralism of Soviet Russia in the 1920s. Haupt's overall approach was informed by dissident Marxists, primarily Lucien Goldmann, Franz Mehring, David Riazanov, and Arthur Rosenberg. An early contributor to Le Maitron, he was involved in establishing an international network of scholars, using his familiarity with a wide array of languages; he worked with François Maspero on a corpus of forgotten socialist literature, with Lelio Basso on editions of Rosa Luxemburg's letters, and with Claudie Weill and Michael Löwy on a large-scale analysis about the interplay between "Marxisms" and nationalist movements. He died of a lingering heart disease while at Fiumicino Airport, leaving behind a number of incomplete projects (with editions continuing to be published into the 1990s).