Holocaust Escapees and Global Development by David Simon

Author:David Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786995155
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

The Activist Academic: Theodor Bergmann

Like Streeten, Theodor Bergmann was able to complete his higher education only after the war, it having been delayed by his flight from Germany and then badly interrupted by his equally precipitate escape from Czechoslovakia after the Anschluss. He enrolled at the University of Bonn, completing his agricultural sciences degree in 1947, before embarking on his PhD at the University of Hohenheim. This drew on his Swedish agricultural experience in addressing changes in Swedish agricultural structure. It was completed in 1955, followed by his Habilitation from 1965 to 1968 on the functions and activity boundaries of production unions in developing countries. All this time, he worked outside the university context, initially as an unskilled metal factory worker, then in the Hannover Chamber of Agricultural Affairs and then leading a project in Turkey.

He was also very active in the labour and communist movements. On returning to Germany, he briefly considered moving to the Soviet Occupation Zone but was dissuaded after illegally crossing into it to meet KPD-O colleagues. He then joined the Gruppe Arbeiterspolitik (Workers’ Politics Group) and edited its newspaper from 1948 until he resigned from the organisation over internal conflicts in 1952. The secretary’s salary of his new wife, Gretel Steinhilber, a fellow party member, kept them afloat while he was unsalaried. They had no children. He later nursed her through a long illness before her death in 1994 (Kessler 2017). Following this loss, he continued his work with increased vigour.

Kessler (ibid.) also records that the Danish economists, Morgens and Ester Boserup, lent political support to Bergmann during the Arbeiterspolitik period. This is a significant connection for purposes of this book, since Ester Boserup worked in India and, along with Heinz Arndt, participated in the landmark Asian Drama project led by Gunnar Myrdal in the 1960s, as explained earlier in this chapter. This connection may well have facilitated Bergmann’s research in India. Whether Bergmann and Arndt met or collaborated is doubtful, both because their politics were by then very different, and because Bergmann is not mentioned in Arndt’s autobiography (Arndt 1985) or biography (Coleman et al. 2007). It is unclear whether Bergmann ever encountered Paul Streeten, an economist just one year his junior and another of Myrdal’s collaborators.

As indicated by the subject of his Habilitation thesis, Bergmann had, during the 1950s and 1960s, expanded the geographical range of his interests beyond Europe, to developing countries and especially those experimenting with different forms of socialist transition. He focused particularly on agricultural and agrarian transformation efforts in China and postcolonial states, especially India. However, he never lost interest in the Israeli kibbutz movement, which comprised many socialist collective experiments, although some later evolved into more individualised models. He returned to that country frequently – partly to visit his extended family – and published regularly on the subject (e.g. Bergmann and Liegle 2002). On all these subjects, he became a leading international authority and regularly undertook consultancies for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). He published widely on these issues in both German and English (e.

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