Twice Exiled: Leo Zuckermann (1908–85) and the Limits of the Communist Promise

Abstract

Beginning with an encounter between Erich Honecker and the Jewish communist Leo Zuckermann that took place in Mexico City in September 1981, this article investigates the relationship of the communist movement in the German-speaking world to the ‘Jewish question’ and the Holocaust. At a reception of the GDR embassy on the occasion of Honecker’s state visit, the Chairman of the State Council shook hands with Zuckermann, a formerly high-ranking Socialist Unity Party of Germany functionary who had fled the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1952, and assured him that he was happy to see him again. This gesture by Honecker rehabilitated a man over whom a blanket of silence had been spread in the GDR decades earlier: during his first exile in Mexico, Zuckermann had developed positions that granted the Jewish people in light of the crimes of National Socialism the right both to restitution and to an independent state. This article offers new insights into the genesis of Zuckermann’s thinking and illuminates the reactions of the party leadership, which was surprisingly not opposed to such partisanship on behalf of the Jewish collective during a short ‘interim period’ from 1943/4 to 1948/9.