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).
Biography Early life Himself a social historian, Anson Rabinbach defines his colleague Georges Haupt as Jewish, but "quintessentially [an] 'uprooted' intellectual", "torn from his national culture by Nazi barbarism."Rabinbach, pp. 79–80 The future scholar was born on January 18, 1928, at Satu Mare in Maramureș.Camarero, p. 159; Jemnitz, p. 234 According to labor historian Hernán Camarero, his was a "typical Jewish bourgeois family of Central Europe", straddling several cultural zones.Camarero, p. 159 Haupt's mentor Ernest Labrousse reports that, as a child, he had already learned four languages—speaking German to his father, Hungarian to his mother, and Romanian to various members of his Transylvanian community, while having also picked up Yiddish from his family connections.Camarero, p. 159; Labrousse, p. 93 At the age of sixteen, his native region, along with the rest of Northern Transylvania, were assigned to Regency Hungary, as part of the Second Vienna Award; as a result of Hungarian extermination policies, in May 1944 Haupt was deported to Auschwitz with his entire family, including a young brother.Camarero, pp. 159–160 He was the only one of them to survive and, according to various of his biographers, was freed upon the camp's liberation later that year.Jemnitz, p. 234 In 1952, Haupt himself provided a different account, namely that he had managed to survive a succession of extermination camps;C. Ciuchindel, "La 30 Noembrie vom vota pentru viața noastră nouă. Minunate cadre", in Scînteia Tineretului, October 24, 1952, p. 3 Camarero suggests that he was moved from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, where his joining of the communist resistance network ensured his ultimate survival, down to the arrival of the United States Army. Haupt also clarified that his imprisonment ended at Buchenwald, whence he was set free, together with the other 10,000 inmates, in 1945."Pentru asigurarea păcii și securității în Europa. Oamenii muncii din patria noastră declară în unanimitate că orice încercare de a tulbura viața pașnică a popoarelor libere va primi o ripostă hotărîtă", in Munca, December 8, 1954, p. 1
In May 1945, shortly before the capitulation of Germany, Haupt was recovering along the Elbe, in Soviet-held territory. According to his own reports, he happened to look on as the United States Air Force bombed bridges in an apparent effort to stall a Soviet offensive.Gh. Haupt, "Note de drum din R. D. Germană. Reconstrucție", in România Liberă, May 7, 1955, p. 2 He returned to Northern Transylvania (which was assigned back to Romania in 1947), reportedly shunning offers to settle in the West.Camarero, p. 160; Jemnitz, p. 234 An adherent of the local Communist Party (which rebranded itself as the "Workers' Party", PMR), he began his higher education locally, at the Bolyai University of Cluj.Camarero, p. 160 He was then sent into the Soviet Union, at Leningrad State University, to specialize in the modern history of the Russian Empire and the Balkans. Haupt's first published work was a Hungarian-language article, in 1949 (when he was aged 21), but for nearly a decade after he wrote almost exclusively in Romanian, reflecting his academic career in the Romanian People's Republic.Labrousse, p. 94. See also Camarero, p. 160 Also in 1949, Studii, the PMR history journal, published his article on the Romanian unification of 1859 and its being welcomed by the Russian magazine Sovremennik. The piece was signed as "M. Haupt Gheorghe".Petru Comarnescu, "Date și interpretări noi ale istoriei românești — în revista Studii", in Universul, November 24, 1949, p. 3
As a student at Leningrad, Haupt acquired proficiency in Russian, and, as he put it in a 1952 interview, "managed to complete a highly scientific form of training". In March 1950, he inaugurated the university's permanent section for the study of literature and languages in people's democracies—with a lecture on Sándor Petőfi as a "revolutionary democratic thinker"."Tudományos intézet létesült leningrádban a népi demokratikus országok irodalmának tanulmányozására", in Romániai Magyar Szó, March 11, 1950, p. 4 His other focus was on the Moldavian and Wallachian revolutions of 1848. Taking his lead from the Romanian communist academic Petre Constantinescu-Iași, he reviewed these events as largely inspired by Russian liberalism.Moisa, p. 130 In early 1951, Studii hosted Dimitrie Cantemir's political essay, Monarchiarum Physica Examinatio, which had been discovered and translated into Romanian by Haupt.Bogdan Crețu, "Lecturi. Cantemir și simbolurile consacrate", in Contemporanul, Vol. XXV, Issue 12, December 2014, p. 4 In a 2023 article, Cantemir expert Ștefan Lemny revisited Haupt's introduction to this text as a sample of Soviet-style history, as dictated by Mihail Roller. According to Lemny, Haupt replicated propaganda against the old-regime historians, castigating Nicolae Iorga and Ștefan Ciobanu for having "falsified" the record; specifically, he argued that Cantemir had been a committed Russophile, and had been influenced by Russian philosophy down to his death.Ștefan Lemny, "Dimitrie Cantemir de la un centenar la altul", in Revista de Istorie și Teorie Literară, Vol. VII, Issues 1–4, January–December 2023, p. 193
On his return to Bucharest in August 1952, the Union of Working Youth presented Haupt with a diploma for excellence, at a ceremony during which he was reportedly greeted with "thunderous applause." As part of his study trips, he went to the German Democratic Republic in summer 1954, visiting East Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and the Harz. He took his graduation diploma in 1955,Labrousse, p. 94 and returned to teach in Romania, expressing his wish to "participate in my homeland's cultural revolution." For a while, he was editor of Studii and lecturer at the University of Bucharest.Camarero, p. 160. See also Rabinbach, p. 77 His new work, mainly carried out through the PMR's Institute of the History of the Labor Movement, was almost entirely focused on the history of Romania in a "universal context".
Stalinist writings and signs of dissent From 1953, Haupt was employed by the Romanian Academy's Institute of History, chairing its Modern and Contemporary Section.Camarero, p. 160; Velimirovici, pp. 54, 80, 110 At that stage, the Romanian academic field had been fully subjugated by Roller, who verified the work of other historians based on their commitment to the replication of Soviet scholarship. In a 2017 overview of the early 1950s, scholar Gabriel Moisa refers to Haupt as one of Roller's "lieutenants" in the "effort of wiping out our national values". The category, as defined by Moisa, also includes Constantinescu-Iași, Iosif Chișinevschi, Miron Constantinescu, and Leonte Răutu.Moisa, pp. 114–115 Camarero similarly notes that Haupt was "a sort of 'official historian'", one of several "controversial aspects" from his work at the apex of Romanian Stalinism. Historian János Jemnitz, who witnessed several of Haupt's visits in the Hungarian People's Republic, notes that Haupt was indeed credited as an official scholar, but never acted accordingly; he claims that, after the "doctors' plot" affair of 1953, "the air began to freeze around Haupt."Jemnitz, pp. 234–235