Miller, Susanne (1915—)

Bulgarian-born German historian, known as the leading historian of the German Social Democratic movement, whose research and persuasive arguments have earned her a worldwide reputation as a scholar. Born Susanne Strasser in Sofia, Bulgaria, on May 14, 1915; daughter of an Austrian banker; studied at the University of Vienna; received Ph.D. from University of Bonn, 1963; married Horace Miller; married Willi Eichler.

Moved from Austria to London (1934); moved to Germany (1946); wrote a large number of books examining the complexities of the relationship between the Social Democratic movement and political power, including the difficulties of creating a democratic spirit in Germany; retired (1978) but remained active in German public life.

Susanne Miller was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1915. As the daughter of a wealthy Austrian Jewish banker, she grew up both in Bulgaria and postwar Vienna, where her father had business interests. Both nations were on the losing side in World War I and suffered immensely in political, economical and moral terms. The brief upsurge of left-wing populism in Bulgaria in the early 1920s, which included an attempted Communist revolution, was drowned in a bloody right-wing reaction that cost many lives and blighted the nation. Austria, too, paid a high price for its defeat. After 1920, Vienna was a "Red" city ruled by reform-minded Social Democrats, but the forces of reaction and fascism grew steadily during these years, particularly in the Austrian provinces where hatred of "immoral and Jewish-controlled" Vienna was deeply rooted among the urban bourgeoisie and many of the peasants.

Alert to conditions in Vienna, young Susanne soon became aware of her own privileged status in a city where the poverty and insecurity of the working classes was all around her. As a student at the University of Vienna in the early 1930s, she was confronted by the brutality of fascism when Nazi students, who were passively supported by many faculty members, physically assaulted Jewish, Socialist, Communist and other students whom they deemed to be "un-German." In February 1934, she witnessed the bloody suppression by a reactionary government of the Social Democratic Party, the last champions of democracy in Austria. After spending the summer of 1934 in London as an au pair in order to study English, she effectively severed her ties to Austria and began to live mostly in England. Free but poor, she supported herself for the next decade by working at a vegetarian restaurant located between Leicester Square and Picadilly Circus. In her leisure time, she gave talks to women's groups affiliated with the Labour Party on the growing threat of fascism. Frustrated by circumstances in her desire to achieve a higher education, she read voraciously and closely followed the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Europe and the world.

During World War II, she entered into a pro forma marriage with Labour Party activist Horace Miller. Acquisition of a British passport would prove essential in later years, when Susanne Miller carried out her plans to return to the Continent to help in the reconstruction of democracy in Central Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

In 1944, Miller became the personal secretary as well as the companion of Willi Eichler, a leader of the International Socialist League of Struggle (ISK). The ideology of this splinter organization of German-speaking socialists was based not on Marxism but on an elitist goal of freedom and ethical advancement as the basis for social reform, as opposed to a regime based purely on economics and compulsion. Miller was strongly influenced by the charismatic Eichler, for whom socialism was an idealistic and universal aspiration applicable to all humanity.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, both Miller and Eichler made plans to return to Germany. She supported Eichler's efforts to bring about a unification of the often hostile factions among the German Social Democratic exile community in the United Kingdom. With this task largely accomplished, they moved in 1946 to occupied Germany, where they married. Settling in the war-devastated city of Cologne, Miller worked with great determination among Social Democratic (SPD) women's groups, while Eichler served as chief editor of the Rheinische Zeitung.

By 1952, Miller's successes in Cologne brought her to the attention of the national SPD leadership, who selected her to work in the party's national executive committee in Bonn. Here she participated in the internal debates which in 1959 resulted in the adoption of the landmark Bad Godesberg declaration. This declaration finally severed the last ties of the SPD to Marxist ideology, including the idea of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Although most of her work had been done behind the scenes, Miller had played a key role in facilitating the party's transition from a 19th-century organization, drawing its strength from a militant industrial working class, to a modern mass-consensus party, which was based on ideals of ethically grounded democratic socialism.

With decades of political upheaval, war, and personal insecurity now behind her, in 1959 Miller activated her long-delayed plans to study for an academic career. She enrolled at the University of Bonn and was fortunate in earning her doctorate in history under the direction of the eminent scholar Karl Dietrich Bracher. Published in 1964, her dissertation Das Problem der Freiheit im Sozialismus was a broadly conceived study of the problem of freedom in Social Democratic theory and practice in German history. Her thesis, namely that since 1848 German Social Democracy had been carrying a double burden of not only fighting for the economic and social advancement of the proletariat but also for the achievement of bourgeois liberty and republican virtue in a profoundly authoritarian society, would be a major theme in all of her subsequent research.

Over the next decades, Miller would publish almost a dozen books on Social Democracy's crucial participation in modern German history. Her 1974 study of the SPD role in World War I utilized not only printed and archival sources but also oral testimony, and it received the highest praise from established experts in the field. Among those who lauded the work was veteran socialist historian Carl Landauer; in the American Historical Review, he praised the volume as "a great contribution to the history of socialism." Additional books by Miller which investigated similar historical problems also earned enthusiastic reviews in virtually all of the important scholarly journals. In collaboration with Heinrich Potthoff, she published a concise history of the German Social Democratic movement aimed at non-specialists (1981), which sold well. By 1991, the work appeared in its seventh edition, necessitated in part by the dramatic events of 1989–90 when the German Democratic Republic collapsed, bringing about German unification in early October 1990.

Although she officially retired in 1978, Miller remained active into the 1990s, serving on various scholarly committees including the SPD executive committee's Historical Commission. She continued to publish works for general readers and remained a conscientious citizen of Germany's democratic society, participating in mass rallies against racism and neo-Nazism, as well as speaking out in favor of tolerance and conciliation. In a 1985 speech on the occasion of Susanne Miller's 70th birthday, former chancellor Willy Brandt pointed out that the underlying inspiration of her work had always been the will to assist in the creation of a better society in which working people would be able to live "good, meaningful and fulfilled lives."

sources:

Breitman, Richard. "Negative Integration and Parliamentary Politics: Literature on German Social Democracy, 1890–1933," in Central European History. Vol. 13, no. 2. June 1980, pp. 175–197.

Haag, John. "Miller, Susanne 1915—," in Kelly Boyd, ed., Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. 2 vols. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999, Vol. 2, pp. 819–822.

Miller, Susanne. Sozialistischer Widerstand im Exil: Prag-Paris-London. Berlin: Gedenkstätte deutscher Widerstand, 1984.

"Tens of Thousands join Anti-Racism Rally in Bonn," in The Reuter Library Report. November 14, 1992.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia